Sentence Correction: Making Sense of Tense
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In complex Sentence Correction questions, very often you are tested for your understanding of how different tenses work together and interact in a sentence to produce effective expression of intent. In this and future posts, we will look together at some tense issues that appear on the GMAT.
What is tense? Tense is an abstract grammatical category that is applied to verbal forms. A verb/verbal form is either inflected by tense or not inflected by tense (conjugated or non-conjugated).
Example:
Hadrian ruled Rome for twenty-one years.
In this sentence, ‘ruled’ is a conjugated verb, in the past tense. ‘Ruled’ has a -d added to it, modifying it from the base form of the verb, which is simply ‘rule.’
There is a common misunderstanding among students about what tenses are. Standardly, we explain the notion of tense through the notion of time. While this is a useful point of departure for understanding tense, this idea does not cover all aspects of tense.
For example, the simplest tense we know – the present tense, does not always indicate something that is occurring right now. Sometimes the present tense is used to indicate something that is always true – a generalization:
Emotions rule the human psyche.
Although the English tense system is quite elaborate (not as elaborate as some languages, though), the lucky thing is that the GMAT does not require you to completely master every aspect of the tense system. In fact, an analysis of official GMAT questions reveals that only six major tenses are tested directly:
- 3 Present Tenses: Present Simple, Present Progressive, and Present Perfect;
- 3 Past Tenses: Past Simple, Past Progressive, and Past Perfect
We won’t go into each of these right now, but notice the method in the madness. We are concerned mostly with Present, Past and the relations between them. We are also concerned, on the GMAT, with what grammarians call “aspect” – another grammatical category that relates to the “feel” of time, the temporal flow of the action, from the point of view of the speaker. The terms “Perfect” and “Progressive” reflect the notion of “aspect”. “Perfect” denotes the aspect of a verb as being bounded or completed, as in: “Hadrian had just slipped off his toga, when the Senator walked into the bath-house”. The Past Perfect “had…slipped off” tells us that this action was completed before the Senator walked in.
Still, even with only six tenses to understand, beware that quite a lot of mayhem can ensue from the wrong use of tenses. Think of the possible permutations of using the wrong tense in a sentence’s different clauses. Luckily, we know that the GMAT Sentence Correction questions do not typically contain more than 2 mistakes.
Confronting tenses is a bit different for native and non-native speakers of English. Native speakers can sometimes rely on a sense that “something sounds wrong” in a sentence, although this may also be a pitfall. There are many colloquial uses of tense that ‘sound okay’, but might be formally wrong. Similarly, British English notoriously has a different set of rules and conventions about the use of the Present Perfect, for example. That is why it is important, when solving Sentence Correction questions, to understand, practice, and apply the formal rules of tense, regardless of the quality of your “ear”. We will take a look at actual GMAT questions and how they test tense in our future posts on this topic.
6 comments
Somsubhra Mukherjee on February 17th, 2012 at 1:26 am
Nice arcticle but this article would be looks much better if there were more examples on tenses.
Narciso on February 17th, 2012 at 6:16 am
"Think of the possible permutations of using the wrong tense in a sentence’s different clauses. Luckily, we know that the GMAT Sentence Correction questions do not typically contain more than 2 mistakes."
Huh?
First, where'd you get this idea that there aren't usually more than 2 errors? Lots of longer SC's have individual answer choices with three or more errors.
Second, even if this were true, I don't see the connection here, since a wrong tense would still be only 1 error.
Please explain.
Master GMAT on February 20th, 2012 at 6:51 am
According to our research, the SC question stem usually has no more than 2 errors. If the stem has 2 errors, the incorrect answer choices usually will correct just one or both, and introduce a new error. Note that is not in the interest of ACT to overload any individual answer choice with multiple errors, as this makes it much easier for the test-taker to eliminate such an answer choice. It would be enough to identify one error to strike it. In fact, the fewer the errors per answer choice, the harder the question.
As for your other point: sentences often do have multiple verbs and therefore a tense error could appear in any verbal form. Because generally we do not see an over-proliferation of errors per answer choice, the full wrong-tense potential of an answer choice is scarcely ever realized.
sojib on February 19th, 2012 at 10:48 pm
nice article. I am going to seat Gmat 10 march, and i want to make good score. to get highest percentile what should i do?
Siying on February 28th, 2012 at 7:49 pm
Nice article!
"Similarly, British English notoriously has a different set of rules and conventions about the use of the Present Perfect, for example. "
Could you elaborate more on this?
Master GMAT on March 7th, 2012 at 1:27 am
In spoken discourse, American speakers often use Past tense where British speakers would use past perfect: e.g.
Brit: I've never gone to a tennis match before, but I am going to one today.
American: I never went to a tennis match before, but I am going to one today.
The American speaker might also use 'I've never gone', but the British speaker would not normally use "I never went', as the British English speakers are normally more cognizant of the effect of the past action on the present (hence present perfect) in speech.