Sentence Correction: Unlike the United States, where farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, the rains in most parts of Sri Lanka are concentrated in the monsoon months, June to September, and the skies are generally clear for the rest of the year. (A) Unlike the United States, where farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, the rains in most parts of Sri Lanka (B) Unlike the United States farmers who can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, the rains in most parts of Sri Lanka (C) Unlike those of the United States, where farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, most parts of Sri Lanka's rains (D) In comparison with the United States, whose farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, the rains in most parts of Sri Lanka (E) In the United States, farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, but in most parts of Sri Lanka the rains

The best option is letter E) In the United States, farmers can usually depend on rain or snow all year long, but in most parts of Sri Lanka the rains.

Explanation:

This type of question can be tough when we don't know what to look for in comparisons, but it gets much simpler when we know the steps. First, we need to find what is being compared. Only similar things can be compared. We can't compare the cars in Rio to the city of São Paulo. We need to compare the cars in Rio to the cars in São Paulo. Then, we need to look for parallelism in the structures, that is, similar grammatical forms in both sides of the comparison. It sounds strange, for instance, to compare a verb to a noun, such as, "Unlike going abroad, the sale of domestic-flight tickets ... " Finally, we need to pay attention to words and expressions that make the comparison. It is common to use "like", "as", "unlike", "in contrast to", "but".

The original sentence given in the instructions needs to be corrected because of the first step. It is comparing a country to the rains in another country. We eliminate letter A because it makes no changes to it. The same goes for letter B, since it compares farmers to rains. Letter C is even messier. The pronoun those is unclear in its reference. Finally, letter D makes the same mistake as the original sentence.

We are left with letter E, which is the best option. It properly compares the two countries: in the United States, something happens, but in most parts of Sri Lanka, something different happens. There is parallelism and the word "but" to establish contrast. E is, therefore, the correct choice.