While the owner of a condominium apartment has free and clear title to

Official Explanation :

Choices A, B, and D can be faulted for comparing a single owner of a condominium with owners of cooperative apartments.

In choice C, the best answer, the nouns agree in number.

Nouns also agree in choice E, but one cannot tell whether the title or the dwelling is said to be free and clear.
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"Whereas" is used to show contrast.
"While" gives the idea of "at the same time".
(A), (B) and (E) are eliminated for this reason.
In (C), "Whereas" is modifying the entire clause and is correct. (D) is wrong for the same reason.

Must compare like things and you are given owners in the non-underlined portion of the sentence. Therefore, eliminate A,B, and D. C is the correct answer because dwelling should be plural and in choice E, it is not. C is concise and clear and the meaning makes sense.

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"owners of condominium apartments have" is parallel to "owners of cooperative apartments have". Whereas is used to express contrast.
Hence C is the correct answer

While the owner of a condominium apartment has free and clear title to the dwelling, owners of cooperative apartments have shares in a corporation that owns a building and leases apartments to them.

(A) While the owner of a condominium apartment has free and clear title to the dwelling,

(B) The owner of a condominium apartment has free and clear title to the dwelling, but

(C) Whereas owners of condominium apartments have free and clear title to their dwellings,

(D) An owner of a condominium apartment has free and clear title to the dwelling, whereas

(E) Condominium apartment owners have a title to their dwelling that is free and clear, while

To maintain parallelism while comparing two subjects, it is essential to make sure they are similar.
In this case, the latter part of the sentence has the subject "owners of cooperative apartments".
So, we want to make sure the first part of the sentence also has a plural comparable subject.
(A), (B), (D) are gone.

Between (C) and (E), (C) has even better parallel structure. Whereas "owners of" ... , "owners of" ...

Ans: (C)

daagh can you please brief the difference between dwellings and dwelling in C and E ?

teaser
'dwelling' is not correct in the given context. Each owner has his own dwelling and as such. all owners have their own dwellings. Otherwise, it looks as if all owners have one single title and one dwelling in E.

These are more contextual than formulaic.

At the same time, we can use the singular in spite of the plural subject. As in the following case, we say that all MDs have their own say in the conduct of the company and not their "says" (plural of say)
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A, B, and D - comparing a single owner of a condominium with owners of cooperative apartments.
E -one cannot tell whether the title or the dwelling is said to be free and clear
C - the best answer, the nouns agree in number.

Hi VeritasKarishma EducationAisle

i know that we have better comparison b/w owners in option C and E ; hence A/B/D can be eliminated, but I wanted to check can we also eliminate option A and E for using "while"? Isn't "while" generally used to show events related with time?

"While" can be used to give contrasting ideas too. Almost every word is used in multiple ways hence until and unless you are certain that some specific usage is incorrect, do not eliminate based on that.

Hi Rohit, this post might help.
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Hello,

I have a doubt that if Choice C is the correct answer then who does "them" in the non underlined portion refer to? Owners of Condominium or of cooperative apartments?

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Logically, them should refer to owners of cooperative apartments.

One could argue that the pronoun them is technically ambiguous here, since them has multiple eligible antecedents. However, pronoun ambiguity is almost never a deal-breaker in GMAT SC.
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Can you please explain why a single owner cannot be compared with multiple owners (OPTION A)? Is Option C (plural to plural comparison) BETTER than Option A (and hence we eliminate OPTION A), or is it that the comparison in OPTION A is illogical or non-sensical irrespective of the presence of OPTION C?

Hello Pankaj0901,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, the use of the plural to plural comparison makes Option C a BETTER answer choice; the comparison in Option A is not incorrect.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team.
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GMATNinja pls help with this quesn.
My logic was, as the answer choices are very similar, the pronoun ambiguity of them can be used to differentiate.
Then option with singular should be selected to make it less ambiguous.

Thanks.

This question is a few decades old, so don't worry about it too much.

One thing to notice is that there's no good reason to compare a SINGLE condominium apartment owner to MULTIPLE cooperative apartment owners. You could argue that using the plural form for both makes the comparison a bit more clear: "owners of thing #1 have X, owners of thing #2 have Y". This structure is "parallel" and simple, so the comparison is very easy to follow.

Also, having the "whereas" up front makes it clear that we should expect a contrast between the two parts -- and again, that helps keep things clear and simple.

Those aren't particularly strong reasons, but that's probably what GMAC had in mind back in the late 80s or early 90s, when this question was first produced.

But again, this question is pretty darned old, so don't lose too much sleep over it!
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