Why B is wrong here. What are the rules to follow when the sentence has hyphens?






Thanks

Apologies again, Luci, for letting this one slip through the cracks.

Hyphenation like this is fairly rare on the test. The part before and after the hyphen should be able to read as one complete, seamless sentence. In this case (starting from after the semi-colon) in choice B: "they denounce big government but supporting at the same time many specific government programs..." You can see that that is not a good sentence, so we can't use it. Choice E has the same problem. The part between the hyphens, by the way, should be some sort of an example or a list of items that can be discarded entirely without messing up the core meaning of the sentence. (Obviously you will lose some meaning if you discard some words, but you should still be able to understand the basic point of the sentence if you remove the text between the hyphens.)

Choice A follows proper parallelism:
They denounce big government,
saying government is doing too much...
,while at the same time. [idiom]
supporting many specific...

Stacey,

Shouldn't denounce and support be parallel, instead of saying and denouncing?

Choice A follows proper parallelism:
They denounce big government,
saying government is doing too much...
,while at the same time. [idiom]
supporting many specific...

i assume you mean "...instead of saying and supporting" (because those are the only two verbs appearing here in the same form).

actually, saying and supporting aren't even parallel in this sentence. they're ostensibly parallel (i.e., they both appear in the "-ing" form), but they're actually not a parallel construction.
saying is a participial modifier that modifies the action of the preceding clause ("they denounce big government"), while supporting is part of a completely different phrase.

i can see why you might think that denounce and support should be parallel, but the requirements of the idiomatic expression "while at the same time..." preclude such parallelism.

by the way, there's a huge thread on this problem at
http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/a-recent-poll-indicates-that-many-people-in-the-united-state-t892.html