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(A) the Supreme Court declared a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia as unconstitutional, and
The parallelism trigger “and” gives us the best hint on this one. The “and” is followed by “ruling that it was a form…”, so we need something that’s parallel to ruling. And we really don’t have that: there are no other “-ing” modifiers that could possibly be an option.
The word order at the beginning of the underlined portion is also just a little bit confusing. It sounds like “the Supreme Court declared a minimum wage for women and children” – which isn’t what the sentence is saying. It’s saying that the Supreme Court declared that the minimum wage
as unconstitutional – so why not keep the phrase “minimum wage as unconstitutional” together? That would make the sentence clearer.
So we can eliminate (A).
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(B) the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia, and
In (B), the phrase “as unconstitutional” is in a much better spot: “declared as unconstitutional a minimum wage…” might sound funny, but it’s much clearer than the version in (A). We now know exactly what the Supreme Court actually declared, without having to think too hard about it. That’s great.
Trouble is, the parallelism still makes no sense, exactly as we described in answer choice (A): “and” is followed by “ruling”, and nothing is parallel with “ruling.”
So we can get rid of (B), too.
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(C) the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia,
The “and” is missing from (C), and that’s actually a good thing: now “ruling that it was a form of price-fixing” is a modifier that gives us more information about the previous clause (“the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a minimum wage…”) And that makes perfect sense.
The placement of the word “unconstitutional” is also much better than in some of the other answer choices: it’s immediately clear that the Supreme Court declared the minimum wage unconstitutional, and that makes the sentence much clearer.
Let’s keep (C).
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(D) a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,
(D) is exactly the same as (C), except that it’s in passive voice: “a minimum wage… was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court” is an unnecessarily indirect way to say “the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a minimum wage…”
To be clear: there are times when passive voice is perfectly acceptable. It’s not automatically wrong. But in this case, there’s no justification for the passive voice: why would we use passive when it’s clearer to just use active voice, and state that the Supreme Court took action?
(D) isn’t as good as (C), so we can eliminate (D).
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(E) when the Supreme Court declared a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia as unconstitutional,
Like (A), (E) separates the phrase “as unconstitutional” from the action it modifies (“the Supreme Court declared a minimum wage”), and that’s a little bit confusing. For more on this issue, see the explanation for answer choice (A).
The bigger issue is that this thing just isn’t a sentence at all. The underlined portion is a modifier, and then it’s followed by another modifier (beginning with “ruling”) – so we never have a main clause, with a nice subject and verb.
So (E) is out, and (C) is our answer.