i doubt that this problem is official, as the beginning words ("in contrast to") are somewhat awkward. if this were an official question, it would just start with "unlike".
still, it's a pretty good problem.
to better resolve these sorts of things, it helps to cut out modifiers and leave the "skeleton" of the sentence.
here, "whose body temp..." is a modifier, and so can be excised, leaving:
in contrast to true hibernators such as woodchucks and hedgehogs, _____
this is a DIRECT COMPARISON, and so absolute parallelism (of both grammar and ideas) is parallel between "true hibernators" and the subject of the ___ part.
this means that the subject of the ____ must be an animal (since true hibernators are animals), and, ideally, should be a plural noun (i.e., "bears" is better than "a bear" for reasons of parallelism).
(e) wins on these criteria alone.
note also that the plural "bears" is required to correspond to the plural pronoun "their" that appears in the non-underlined part.
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the posters here who chose answer (c) need an intensive review of both parallelism and pronouns.
the presence of "their" provides for IMMEDIATE elimination of anything that doesn't contain the plural "bears". if you don't see this VERY quickly, you need to review pronouns.
also, you should be able to look at "a bear's body temperature" and know at once that it's not parallel to the animals mentioned earlier, because a bear's body temperature is not an animal.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.
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Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron en castellano
Potete chiedere domande a Ron in italiano
On peut poser des questions à Ron en français
Voit esittää kysymyksiä Ron:lle myös suomeksi
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Quand on se sent bien dans un vêtement, tout peut arriver. Un bon vêtement, c'est un passeport pour le bonheur.
Yves Saint-Laurent
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