Height Decline

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The average height of Americans and Europeans decreased during the rapid industrialization of the 19th century, a decline that is explained not so much because of a population increase as by the fact that economic inequality become more acute, leading to widely disparate levels of nutrition.

Review: Height Decline


Explanation

Creating a filter: suppose that we dislike this original sentence but can't easily find an objective error. In such a case, we can proceed to (B) and search for objective defects, noting that we have not decisively eliminated (A).

Finding objective defects: we might judge (B) less bad than (A). We'll come back to it. The verb tenses in (C) are unnecessarily involved -- in "was increasing" and "having become." So (C) is out. Choice (D) has the same problems and also a parallelism error -- a missing "because" after "as." Choice (E) also has a lack of parallelism between the phrase "because of," which introduces a noun, and "because," which introduces a clause. Indeed, that's also a problem with (A), between "because of" and the word "by." The correct answer is (B).


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