limestone wrote:In recent years cattle breeders have increasingly used crossbreeding, in part that their steers should acquire certain characteristics and partly because crossbreeding is said to provide hybrid vigor.

A.
B. in part for the acquisition of certain characteristics in their steers
C. partly because of their steers acquiring certain characteristics
D. partly because certain characteristics should be acquired by their steers
E. partly to acquire certain characteristics in their steers

[spoiler]OA: later[/spoiler]

limestone wrote:Thanks Jim for your suggestion. Next time, I'll put OA in Spoiler right after the question.

OA is E. However, I chose D as it retains the parallel of "because + S + V". Am I missing something?

Jim@Grockit wrote:

limestone wrote:Thanks Jim for your suggestion. Next time, I'll put OA in Spoiler right after the question.

OA is E. However, I chose D as it retains the parallel of "because + S + V". Am I missing something?

Choice D has wordiness and the passive voice going against it. You weren't wrong to go with the most parallel answer on a guess though -- the GMAT loves parallelism so much, they should get married. There are times when the most parallel answer is wrong, though, because it introduces new errors. In this case they are "GMAT errors" -- wordiness and the passive voice are not incorrect in real life, just not always the best choice.