Help needed

[AseemJ807]

In 1852 Robert Angus Smith published a detailed report of the chemistry of rain in a large area around the city of Manchester, England, noting that the closer one came to town, the more the city air would become increasingly acidic.

A) that the closer one came to town, the more the city air would become increasingly acidic
B) that the city air became increasingly acidic the closer one came to town
C) that coming closer to town, the city air became increasingly acidic
D) that the more the city air became increasingly acidic, the closer one was to town
E) the city air becoming increasingly acidic as one would come closer to town

I marked A but the correct answer is B. In my opinion, in option B, the should be immediately follows by a comparative noun but it is not.

In 1984 medical researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities concluded that sedentary life-styles lead to heart and lung diseases that shorten lives, strongly recommending middle-aged people to undertake some form of regular exercise.

(A). strongly recommending middle-aged people to
(B). strongly recommending that middle-aged people should
(C). and strongly recommended for middle-aged people to
(D). and their strong recommendation was for middle-aged people to
(E). and they strongly recommended that middle-aged people

Isn't there a rule that with a bossy verb in past tense, you cannot use subjunctive ? Please clarify. That is why I chose option A but answer is E.

Also my verbal score is stuck between 37-40 and I want to push it beyond at least 42. Before I ask my question, Few points I would like to put forward:
A) In all practice sessions, My scoring rate is around 90% in SC. In MGMAT, in every mock I just got one or two SCs wrong per mock. However, on GMAT prep, the numbers of incorrect questions increase to 6 or 7. I don't know why.
B) My CR is a weak point but I do manage it and same is with RC.

In all mocks my minimum verbal score is 38 and maximum is 41. But as I said, I'm Determined to get above 42. My GMAT is scheduled for 4th August, 2017.

So my question is:
Is this improvement possible in one week?
What should I do to improve my score?

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

I can help with your difficulty on this GMAT problem, but your general timeline questions should be directed either to your instructor or the appropriate forum. Apologies for the slight delay in replying here.

In the first question, it looks like you're looking for the construction "the [comparative], the [comparative]", such as in the sentence 'The bigger my car, the happier I am.' The problem with this is that none of the sentences has it! In answer A, the word 'would' really messes things up. There's a danger of looking for the sentence that you want to see, rather than considering the options GMAT gives to you. This suggests a weakness in your approach to SC.

Answer B is a similar construction, but "increasingly acidic" is the comparative in the first part of the sentence. If your opinion goes against B, then it's time to revise your opinion.

There's a long discussion of the second problem here: https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/foru ... 30344.html