Appearing to be the only candidate whose views would be acceptable to its membership, the Youth Canorous finally endorsed Gorge for city council.
A) Appearing to be
B) Seeming to be
C) Because he appeared to be
D) Because he seemed
E) Being
OA is C. Could you tell me the structure in C?
Thanks

process of elimination here for sure.

a, b, and e are wrong right away, because they're misplaced modifiers: they don't have subjects, and so must modify the noun immediately following. in all 3 cases, that following noun is 'the y.c.', while the modifier is clearly meant to refer to 'gorge'.

of the other two, choice d is wrong because of incorrect idiomatic usage (you can't eliminate 'to be' from 'seemed to be the only...').

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the correct answer here is unusual, in that it contains a pronoun ('he') that appears quite far ahead of its referent ('gorge'). interesting.

I screwed this one up bad.
I saw the choices
1. Eliminated E for 'Being'
2. Eliminated C and D because 'he' occured before George in the sentence.
3. was left trying to choose between A and B -> chose B for no good reason.

RON has already pointed out that it is unusual for 'he' (the pronoun) to occur before 'George' (the subject).
But, now I am at a loss on how I should approach such a problem. Maybe I should consider this - pronoun before noun - rule at a low priority.

But I remember that in one GMATprep problem on this forum we chose the right answer purely on the basis of this rule.
I will post the link as soon as I find it. (Stacey posted taht explantion)

Any input on the kind of approach to be followed will be appreciated.

well, there's no strict rule stating that pronouns can't appear before their referents; it's just that they usually don't.
this is a preference; you should never place preferences above hard and fast rules.

one hard and fast rule that's in play here is the fact that 'headless' modifiers (those with no subject) automatically modify the noun immediately following the comma. this rule eliminates choices (a) and (b), because 'youth canorous' doesn't correctly state who appeared/seemed to be the only candidate who blah blah blah.



preference, not rule.
you are correct in asserting that its priority should be lower than that of all bona fide rules.



post it if you can find it; it would be interesting if that were indeed the only issue. perhaps the wrong answer had an excessive distance between the pronoun and the referent, engendering confusion? or, more likely yet, there was some ambiguity in the wrong answer?