超晕的提问，帮我翻译一下！

Any of the following, if true, is a valid reason for benchmarking the performance of a company against companies with which it is not in competition rather than against competitors except:

还有XDF绿皮书《逻辑和数学教程》中P62的171题答案为什么是D而不是E？

先谢一个

我也晕

看着就像绕口令，不过像这样的长句提问，应该是看到a valid ... except 就行吧，剩下的应该是原文里的描述内容。我觉得，要是问题明显很长，就不能先看问题再读原文。