Q: In this task, you will be shown a prompt from a judicial decision and multiple holding statements derived from citations following text in a legal decision.  Holdings represent the governing legal rule when the law is applied to a particular set of facts. There are five answer choices for each citing text. The correct answer is the holding statement that corresponds to the citing text. The four incorrect answers are other holding statements. You should find the correct option. There is a <HOLDING> token in the position of the citing text prompt where the holding statement was extracted.
willingness to consider impermissible factors such as ... age ... while engaging in one set of presumably neutral employment decisions ... might tend to support an inference that such impermissible considerations may have entered into another area of ostensibly neutral employment decisions — here, an employee’s termination.” Conway v. Electro Switch Corp., 825 F.2d 593, 597-98 (1st Cir.1987). However, we agree with the district court that, standing alone, it is too remote in time to be linked with the decision to terminate Mulero. See Birkbeck v. Marvel Lighting Corp., 30 F.3d 507, 512 (4th Cir.1994) (finding that discriminatory comment made over two years prior to discharge was not evidence of age discrimination); Phelps v. Yale Security, Inc., 986 F.2d 1020, 1026 (6th Cir.) (<HOLDING>), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 861, 114 S.Ct. 175, 
 Holding statements: (A) holding that the litigation privilege did not preclude a malicious prosecution claim where the accusatorial statements that led to the plaintiffs arrest were made before the charges against him were filed and were not made during and were unrelated to the judicial proceeding (B) holding that statements that a company was recessionresistant and that it would maintain a high level of growth were too vague to constitute material statements of fact (C) holding that statement made eight months before employee was dismissed and one made at least ten months before were not too remote from the dismissal and thus properly admitted at trial as evidence of a discriminatory atmosphere where he who made the first statement may have participated in the decision to fire her and the other refused to block her termination (D) holding that statements made almost a year before layoff were too far removed to have influenced decision (E) holding that statements made in the course of negotiation were not contracts and such statements were merged into the final written agreement
A:
(D)