dextar wrote:Unlike its competitors, Globex and Mondecorp, the revenues of Galactic Enterprises increased by cornering the widget market in the fourth quarter, thus making Galactic Enterprises the world’s most profitable company and a darling of Wall Street.

1) same
2) Globex and Mondecorp, its competitors, the revenues of Galactic Enterprises increased by cornering the widget market in the fourth quarter, thus making
3) its competitiors, Globex and Mondecorp, Galactic Enterprises increased its revenues by cornering the widget market in the fourth quarter , by making
4) Globex and Mondecorp, its competitors, Galactic Enterprises increased its revenues by cornering the widget market in the fourth quarter , thus making
5) its competitiors, Globex and Mondecorp , the revenues of Galactic Enterprises cornered the widget market in the fourth quarter , thus making

It's always good to start a sentence correction question by playing "spot the issue". If you learn to quickly identify the most commonly tested issues, you'll save a lot of time on test day.

Here, we see the word "unlike", which immediately triggers "comparison" in our minds. Comparisons have to be structurally and logically parallel to be valid.

In the original, we're comparing the competitors to "the revenues of...". We can't compare companies to revenues, so we have an illogical comparison. Scanning the choices, we see that (2) and (5) make the same mistake: eliminate (1), (2) and (5).

The big difference between (3) and (4) comes at the end (the change of order at the beginning doesn't have much impact on the sentence, both versions are grammatically correct): "by making" vs "thus making".

Each version is grammatically correct, but each one means something completely different. Other things being equal, we're not supposed to change the meaning of the original sentence. The original uses "thus making", so that's the version we're going to select: choose (4).

I ever went with 3.