massi2884 wrote:[spoiler]Are A and B wrong because Fanboys need a verb? Thanks (OA is E)[/spoiler]

By 1914, ten of the western states had granted women the right to vote, but only one in the East.

(A) only one in the East
(B) only one eastern state
(C) in the East there was only one state
(D) in the East only one state did
(E) only one in the East had

In this question we need parallelism to help avoid repetition.

We could write: By 1914, ten of the western states had granted women the right to vote, but only one state in the East had granted women the right to vote, but this is pretty wordy.

To avoid writing had granted women the right to vote, we need parallelism to give the reader an idea of the general pattern of the sentence.

With A, B and C, it's unclear what the author is trying to say.
For example, answer choice A says "By 1914, ten of the western states had granted women the right to vote, but only one in the East"
Only one in the East did what?

D uses a tense that breaks the parallelism. It uses "did" when we need "had" to maintain parallelism.

The best answer is E, since it maintains sufficient parallelism to allow us to fill in the blanks: "By 1914, ten of the western states had granted women the right to vote, but only only one [state] in the East had [granted women the right to vote]."

Cheers,
Brent