Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

oh, and by the way:
this would be incorrect. it's a run-on sentence.

the orange part is a complete sentence, and the words after the comma (with your "are") are another complete sentence.

you can't have the construction complete sentence + COMMA + complete sentence. that's called a run-on (comma splice) and is ALWAYS wrong.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron

it's not a past-tense verb; it's actually a PAST PARTICIPLE. in other words, it's in the same class as words such as
dedicated
considered
thrown
taken

the reason why this is a difficult recognition, in this case, is that the past-tense form ("thought"), for this particular verb, looks exactly the same as the past participle form ("thought"). in fact, that's the case for the vast majority of verbs in english, although there are exceptions -- irregular verbs for which the past participle and the past tense look different.
for instance, the last two verbs in the above list are among these irregular verbs:
* "thrown" is exclusively a past participle; the past tense is "threw"
* "taken" is exclusively a past participle; the past tense is "took"

i'll illustrate why this is a correct construction with one of those two participles, since it's easier to see that it's NOT a past-tense verb:
after the earthquake, janice came home to find her house in ruins, its roof severed from the walls and thrown fifty feet horizontally.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron

well, i would imagine that there are two ways to do this, the first of which (in my mind) is really the only feasible one:

1, look at tons and tons of examples of correct constructions involving each of these forms, until you can recognize analogous constructions on sight.
this is pretty much the way the human brain is made to absorb language -- by imitation, rather than by analysis. (you are not going to find a child alive who absorbs his first language through the use of systematic analysis. while learning second languages later in life is certainly different, and much harder, then learning one's first language in childhood, all evidence points to the fact that imitative learning is still by far the easiest.)

2, somehow try to cobble together an exhaustive list of every possible use of these forms, try to memorize all of them, and then (probably even harder than those first two steps, as hard as those already are) somehow train yourself to the point where you can recognize any and all of those forms within the distinct time window provided for sentence correction!

i really don't think at the second of these is very reasonable, which pretty much leaves you with the first.

as a hint, one of the best ways you can educate yourself about the proper use of grammatical forms is:
* search them as search terms on the internet
* find grammar sites that contain correct illustrations alongside incorrect ones
* compile a list of those illustrations
* look it over and make sure you know which ones are correct and which ones are incorrect

if you are really dedicated, you can put each individual example -- a healthy selection of both correct and incorrect ones -- onto a flash card, and then, on the back of the flash card, write either CORRECT or INCORRECT and then give a very brief identification of the grammatical structure at hand.
remember, don't go overboard with the identification and/or classification; the whole point is that you primarily develop the ability to RECOGNIZE the forms, without having to name them in order to do so!

yeah, that's how those work -- they modify nouns. unless there are other intervening modifiers, they generally default to the closest noun.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron