666. South Korea has witnessed the world’s most dramatic growth of Christian congregations; church membership is expanding by 6.6 percent a year, fully two-thirds of the growth coming from conversions rather than the population increasing.

(A) coming from conversions rather than the population increasing
(B) coming from conversions rather than increases in the population
(C) coming from conversions instead of the population’s increasing
(D) is from conversions instead of population increases
(E) is from conversions rather than increasing the population

Solution:

Idioms + Parallelism

In E and D, “church membership is expanding… , fully two thirds of the growth is from…” leads to comma-splice problem. When two independent clauses are connected by only a comma, they constitute a run-on sentence that is called a comma-splice.
In C, “population’s increasing” is awkward.
In B, “from conversions rather than increases…” is idiomatic and parallel and hence, B is the best choice.
In A, “…from conversions rather than the population increasing” violates parallelism.

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