Answer:
The answer is D. audience gave a well-deserved.
Explanation:
Audiences normally give and not receive applauses, so this is the error in the sentence, which allows us to eliminate the other which don't have a "gave" for verb, which basically are options: A, C and E.
Why isn't B? Well, because our rule about hyphens in adjectives, tells us that if the adjective goes before the noun, it should be hyphenated. But, if the adjective goes after, then it should not. In this case, our noun is "applause" and as you can see it goes after the "well-deserved" adjective, so this is the reason why it's hyphenated. Other story would be if it said: the round of applause was well deserved (no hyphen, as it goes after).
