At the annualstock holders meeting, investors heard a presentation on the numerous challenges facing the company, including among them the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and the declining sales for the company's powerful microprocessor chip.

A. including among them the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and the declining sales for
B. which includes the threat of a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and declining sales of
C. included among these the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit as well as a decline in sales for
D. among them the threat of a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and the decline in sales of
E. among these the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit as well as the decline in sales for

OA is given as D. Instructors, this is a GMAT PREP question. I can post the image for proof if necessary. I picked C.

Here are my questions?

1) In D what does "them" refer to. Investors or challenges?
2) Also which is corect idiom - threat from / threat of. I thought threat from was correct and thats why picked C.
3) I actually inclined more towards E than D, because I thought among "these" in E is more appropriate than among "them" in D.
4) Also which is correct - declining sales of/ declining sales for / decline in sales of/ decline in sales for

A. including among them the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and the declining sales for
B. which includes the threat of a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and declining sales of
C. included among these the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit as well as a decline in sales for
D. among them the threat of a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit and the decline in sales of
E. among these the threat from a rival's multi-billion dollar patent-infringement suit as well as the decline in sales for

I think correct usgae would be "sales of" which eliminates option A,C and E.
Now betweern B and D I feel "which" wrongly modifies company and we can eliminate this option.
Moreover B also violates parallelism by wrongly using "the threat" and "declining"

How can we know the referent of "them" in choice D?
If it would refer to investor, should it be "themselves"?
Is that the reason with "them" refers to challenges?

Please, any feedback is welcome!

1) the word " challeges" is the only logical referent of them. you cannot refer it to investors.
2) among them is placed älmost next to "numerous challenges facing the company"..only a essential modifer-facing the company - is coming in between.

One more thing that is incorrect in C and E is the use of these (without modifier) which cannot refer to a noun.
Instructors - Am I write on this reasoning ?

@ sd

you can answer about 50% of your questions below with the following deep yet obvious insight:

CORRECT ANSWERS ON OFFICIAL PROBLEMS ARE CORRECT.
if something is in a correct answer on an official problem, then do not question it; you'll just be wasting your time.
officially correct answers NEVER contain anything that is incorrect. period, end of story.


from context it's clear that "them" is challenges.
you shouldn't treat pronoun ambiguity as an absolute rule. see here for more detail: post30983.html#p30983
* in this case, "them" is parallel to "challenges" (they're both objects of prepositions)
* it's also 100% clear from context that "them" is supposed to stand for "challenges".



"threat of" is the one that appears in the officially correct answer, so that one is correct.

"threat from" is used for people (jim was bothered by the threats from his brother-in-law), not for abstract concepts such as the ones discussed in this problem.



this is another case where you can learn from the correct answer. "among them" is better than "among these".

you should probably just memorize this as an idiom.


"sales for" is unidiomatic.
"declining sales of" and "decline in sales of" are both correct, but PARALLELISM requires the latter.
the parallelism in the correct answer is sublime:
among them the threat of a rival's multibillion-dollar patent-infringement suit and the decline in sales of...
that's beautiful. both halves of the parallel structure are '...the [abstract notion] of [concrete business/law concept]. parallelism doesn't get any better than that.
in the case of "declining sales", the parallelism falters, because you're comparing 'threat' to '(declining) sales' - two concepts that are not parallel in terms of ideas. subtle, but enough to kill an answer choice on the real gmat; you have to be really, really, really picky to make sure that the two main nouns being compared are logically parallel.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

I think option C is also wrong since included modifies company rather than challenges..Am i right?

yeah, that's the normal use of that sort of modifier (past participle following a comma).

in fact, it's extremely rare for those kinds of modifiers to ever follow the whole main clause. in fact, i can't think of a single example sentence at the moment in which that is done legitimately.

if you have these sorts of past-participle modifiers, with commas, then they'll generally come in one of two places:
* before the entire main clause (Displaced from his home by the earthquake, James moved in with his cousins)
* after the subject (James, displaced from his home by the earthquake, moved in with his cousins)

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Also, isnt including among redundant? anybody?

yes.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Just to confirm, is the redundancy in "include among" powerful enough to do a 2:3 split and eliminate A and C?

Can redundancies be taken as an absolute rule i.e. are the GMAT test makers that paranoid about concision?

you can use that as a basis for elimination, yes. (i'm not sure why you are mentioning the numbers of choices.)



redundancy and concision are completely different and unrelated considerations.
redundancy -- which is actually an error -- is the repetition of the same concept more than one time.
concision -- the lack of which is not actually an error -- is just the use of fewer words.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Hi Instructors ,

Can We do a split with regard to parallelism first and eliminate all options except D and E ?

Please let me know your comments.

Hi,

Can you kindly confirm why A is wrong? Is it because of wrong usage of including or unidiomatic threat from?

Also, C can we say usage of both include and among causes redundancy.

Also, from one of GMAT official blog, I figured that GMAT has removed/ atleast removed idioms from their test questions, do we still need to remember such idiom list??

Yes you can do that. But here in this question if you are using parallelism to remove the incorrect answer choices then you can do away only with A & B.

C, D & E possess the correct parallelism but C & E have some other errors such as redundancy, incorrect IDIOMS etc.

Thanks for the reply studentreading2011