In many upper-class Egyptian homes, French was spoken within

[ghong14]

Hi I got this question from the GMAT old paper tests but I changed it up to avoid any copyright issues.

In many upper-class Indian homes, English was spoken within the family, just as it had once been among the African aristocracy.

(A) just as it had once been among the African aristocracy
(B) just like it once had been among the African aristocracy
(C) just as the African aristocracy had once done
(D) similar to what the African aristocracy had done once
(E) like what had once been done by the African aristocracy

The OA is A.

I am not seeing the parallelism here. Can anyone elaborate?

I choose C but is that not parallel?

[RonPurewal]

In many upper-class Indian homes, English was spoken within the family, just as it had once been among the African aristocracy.

There's your parallelism.

C is not parallel. For C to be parallel, the first part would have to say something of the form "the family did xxxxx".

[ghong14]

just as it had once been among the African aristocracy.

Doesn't this create a past perfect stating that English was spoken in African aristocracy before indian family? Is that what the sentence is trying to convey. I thought they were just both simple pasts......

Had once been is a past perfect right?

[RonPurewal]

Any two verb tenses can be parallel, as long as the sentence makes sense in context.

The tense is a non-issue in this problem anyway, since all five versions are written as "had done/had been/had xxxxx".