This comes from the GMAT Prep test from MBA.com

In contrast to ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States trade defecit with Mexico declined by $500 million as a result of record exports to the country.

A) same
b)In contrast to ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States sold record exports to Mexico, reducing its trade deficit by $500 million.
c) When compared with ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States sold record exports to Mexico,reducing their trade deficit by $500 million.
d)Compared with ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States sold record exports to Mexico, reducing the trade deficit by $500 million.
e) Compared to ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States record exports to Mexico caused a $500 million decline in the trade deficit with that country.

OE is A. I was able to eliminate B and C due to the use of the pronouns in the second part (referring to Mexico or US). Why is E incorrect, I feel like it clear. I thought that A was incorrect because of the use of "contrast to" When do we use Compare with vs. Compare to and Contrast with vs. Contrast to? are they interchangeable?

Option “E” is wrong because this option is comparing apples to oranges. For e.g. it is “ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan” with “the United States record exports to Mexico”. Correct answer choice “A” has right comparision. You can use “In contrast to” do the comparision.

rschunti is on the mark.

to be specific, choice e compares 'trade imbalances' to 'the U.S.', which is about as invalid as comparisons get.

for that matter, the other wrong answers (b, c, d,) ALL make the same invalid comparison as well. only choice a properly compares the ongoing trade imbalances to the u.s. trade deficit.

Ron sir
I think E compares 'trade imbalances' to 'the U.S. record exports' so comparision should be valid

I believe you have it right when you say -

BUT How can 'trade imbalances' be compared to US record exports? It makes grammatically correct structure. But logically 'trade imbalances' can be compared with 'trade deficit' but not with exports.

E does not have possesive form of US so E is comparing "trade imbalances with the US.
For the meanin gyou wrote above E would need united states'

Pathik

indeed.

and even in the (somewhat likely) event that the original poster simply forgot an apostrophe, the comparison is still logically invalid, for reasons stated above by Captain.

I quote the above from another thread,http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/gmatprep2-sentence-correction-question-need-help-t1848.html

as I think Ron has made a little mistake here about what's being compared in choice E.

As far as I understand, in E of this version,"trade imbalance" and " US record exports" are being compared.

in E of another version(in the above link), "trade imbalances" is compared with"United States"
E) Compared to ongoing trade imbalances with China and Japan, the United States sold record exports to Mexico, reducing the trade deficit by $500 million.

one more point, even if we wanna use "US" as a adjective, we don't need to put "'s" after it.

i don't see the difference -- you said that i made a mistake, but then you are pointing out exactly same comparison that i pointed out. (note that "exports" and "US record exports" are the same item; i just didn't bother to list the adjectives that are modifying it, while you did.)

is there a difference?

Sorry I didn't made myself clear in the last post.

There are two version of E for this SC problem. One is making comparision between "imbalance" and" record export"(Version 1) , the other is making comparision between"imbalance" and "US"(version 2).

what I meant for "mistake" is : It seems that the explanations for the 2 versions are put in the wrong threads. the above quoted part ,which is the first answer from you in this thread, should be for Version 2. (in this thread , E is version 1)

And Version 2 is in the link I mentioned in my last post,

On the other hand, the quoted part of my last part ,which I think is explanation for Version 1 , appears in the thread for version 2.

I actually totally agreed with you on this issure,Ron, I just noticed it and thought the two explanaions may need to be exchanged.

ah. ok.

perhaps you could do us a favor and post both full versions, then, in a single post?

Btw, I don't see anybody talking about the difference between "In contrast to" and "Compared to/with"? Aren't they supposed to imply different comparisons?

Compare to X, Y is better.

In contrast to X, Y is better.

Are the above construction same? Shouldn't that be 1st reason why C, D, E should be eliminated? Thanks.

that particular topic hasn't yet been discussed because (a) those choices can be eliminated without it, and (b) no one has asked about it yet. (:

in this sentence, “compared to/with” doesn't really make sense -- here's how to use it: a sentence that uses “compared to/with” should explicitly mention both items in the comparison.

for instance:
the unemployment rate in county X is 6 percent, compared to 11 percent in neighboring county Y.
this is a correct sentence; note that it explicitly mentions both of the statistical quantities in the comparison.

for this reason, it is inappropriate to use “compared to/with”, because, while statistical information is given about america's trade relationship with mexico, there is no corresponding statistical information about the trade deficits with china and japan.



there's no such thing as a “first reason”. if something is incorrect, then it's incorrect.

In the answer choices, the second part needs some clarification.
reducing its/the/their trade deficit..

Is the usage of pronouns its/the/their correct? Wouldn't it create problems of correct reference? It could belong to any of : "ongoing trade imbalances", "China and Japan", "US" or "Mexico".

Also, in the second part in E, "exports to Mexico caused a $500 million..", is the usage of "caused" verb correct?

the pronoun issue here is definitely worth thinking about.

you are, however, allowed to use common sense to resolve pronouns. in other words, if there are theoretically multiple nouns to which a pronoun might refer (as in the example you've given here), the pronoun can still be correct if the context makes its reference absolutely clear.
for instance, the pronoun “its” in choice (b) is fine, because both the semantics (meaning) and the grammar make it clear that that pronoun refers to the united states.

also note that there is no pronoun issue at all in the correct answer, as the construction in that choice doesn't contain a pronoun.



it seems fine to me.