Sentence Correction

gmat_ttt wrote:Unlike the United States, Japanese unions appear reluctant to organize lower-paid workers.

(A) Unlike the United States, Japanese unions appear reluctant to organize
(B) Unlike those in the United States, Japanese unions appear reluctant to
organize
(C) In Japan, unlike the United States, unions appear reluctant to organize
(D) Japanese unions, unlike the United States, appear reluctant to organize
E) Japanese unions, unlike those in the United States, appear reluctant about
organizing

OA is b. This is definitely the best answer as far as comparison goes. But isn't those in OA referring to Japanese unions rather than just unions and thus making Japanese unions sort of a dangling modifier.

thanks.

i agree with the original poster here: the official answer to this problem is defective. although the source of the problem is not noted, i would conjecture that it is not an official problem, because the 'correct' answer features an unacceptable lack of parallelism.
here's why:
the construction 'those of...' requires strict parallelism - i.e., it must be parallel to some other structure in the sentence that uses the preposition OF.
same thing goes for 'those in...', as used in these examples; if you write 'those in...', then there MUST be another construction containing the preposition IN elsewhere in the sentence for the parallelism to be valid.

one could fix choice b, then, by replacing 'japanese unions' with 'unions in japan' (a construction that doesn't appear anywhere in the answer choices).

incidentally, 'dangling modifier' is the incorrect terminology here; a dangling modifier is something completely different. here's a link if you're interested, although linguistic terminology should be the least of your concerns as you're studying for this test.

Hi sukkhi,

Parallelism and Comparison rules require that you compare "like" things AND do so in "Parallel Format" (which means that the order of the words must match).

In this SC, you could compare:
-A country to another country
-A union to another union
-What happens in one country to what happens in another country
Etc.

Answer C begins with "In Japan...."; to be parallel, the sentence would have to state "....in the United States....", which is does NOT do. Thus, answer C is incorrect.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich