What Ron ( Manhattan ) said :
choice (e) is TOTALLY wrong. if you can't kill choice (e) quickly, you should read through a large number of correct answers to SC questions in the official guides, just for the purpose of internalizing the writing style of the correct answers.
i can't overestimate the importance of becoming comfortable with the writing style of the gmat. in the same way you can classify language as 'shakespearean' or 'faulkner-esque' at a glance, you can also classify language as to whether you might see it on the gmat. once you achieve a certain degree of this familiarity, choice (e) and its ilk will begin to look ridiculous.
the formal reasons why choice (e) is wrong: 1, it uses the passive voice for no good reason whatsoever, and, 2, more importantly, it says only that state laws were being violated; it doesn't at all indicate the crucial fact that the ban violated the state laws. that's baaaaaadd bad bad.
choice (c) is wrong because the tenses don't make sense. 'violates' is in the present tense, but 'allowed' is in the past tense. either one of these tenses could potentially make sense individually, but the combination is absurd: you can't violate (present tense) a law that used to allow something (past tense). if you're going to violate the law in the present tense, then whatever part of the law was violated had better carry over into the present tense.
interestingly, all 3 other tense combinations make sense: violates/allows, violated/allows (if the law is still in effect), and violated/allowed (if the law is no longer in effect).
choice (d) circumvents this issue altogether by employing the participle form (-ing). despite its name (it's formally called the "present participle"), this form is NOT necessarily a present-tense construction; rather, it has no inherent tense at all, and merely adopts the tense of whatever verbs in the sentence do have a tense. therefore, in choice (d), 'allowing' takes place in the past tense, simultaneously with 'violated'.
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