Sentence Correction

Under a provision of the Constitution that was never applied, Congress has been required to call a convention for considering possible amendments to the document when formally asked to do it by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states.

A. was never applied, Congress has been required to call a convention for considering possible amendments to the document when formally asked to do it

B. was never applied, there has been a requirement that Congress call a convention for consideration of possible amendments to the document when asked to do it formally

C. was never applied, whereby Congress is required to call a convention for considering possible amendments to the document when asked to do it formally

D. has never been applied, whereby Congress is required to call a convention to consider possible amendments to the document when formally asked to do so

E. has never been applied, Congress is required to call a convention to consider possible amendments to the document when formally asked to do so

OA:E

The trick here is to spot the tense:

Notice that choices A, B and C all start with a past tense form of the verb: was never applied. This is incorrect because the meaning is just "begging for" a present perfect form of the verb. The provision has never been applied up until now. It's that rule: if an action started sometime in the past and continued up until the present moment, then the required tense is the present perfect.

So you're left with choices D and E. The difference between them is that whereby that you don't see every day. This word means "in accordance with" and is therefore unnecessary: Under the provisions phrase conveys exactly the same meaning, so using whereby is a pleonasm.

This is why choice E is correct.

DanaJ wrote:The trick here is to spot the tense:

Notice that choices A, B and C all start with a past tense form of the verb: was never applied. This is incorrect because the meaning is just "begging for" a present perfect form of the verb. The provision has never been applied up until now. It's that rule: if an action started sometime in the past and continued up until the present moment, then the required tense is the present perfect.

So you're left with choices D and E. The difference between them is that whereby that you don't see every day. This word means "in accordance with" and is therefore unnecessary: Under the provisions phrase conveys exactly the same meaning, so using whereby is a pleonasm.

This is why choice E is correct.

OK Here is much simpler version what Danaj stated above.

In GMATLand , "do it" is always wrong. You cannot refer verb with do it.

Therefore A, B, C out.

Whereby introduces subordinate clause. But we need a Independent clause.

Hence E

i still don't understand why whereby is wrong, and why an independent clause is necessary for this

@tyronetan82, we need an independent clause here in order to make sentence complete. Every sentence MUST have at least one independent clause (another way to say it is that every sentence MUST have at least one main subject-main verb pair).

This sentence is introduced by a dependent clause, beginning with the preposition "under." The word "whereby" is a subordinate conjunction, so it also begins a dependent clause. In answer choice D then, we have:

[Dependent], [dependent].

There's no independent clause, so there's no main subject-main verb, so the sentence is incomplete. In E, the structure becomes:

[Dependent], [independent].

The main subject-verb pair here is "Congress is," and now we have a complete sentence.

Hope that helps!

thanks for the help Jen!

That was no simpler than what Dana said.

piyush_nitt wrote:

DanaJ wrote:The trick here is to spot the tense:

Notice that choices A, B and C all start with a past tense form of the verb: was never applied. This is incorrect because the meaning is just "begging for" a present perfect form of the verb. The provision has never been applied up until now. It's that rule: if an action started sometime in the past and continued up until the present moment, then the required tense is the present perfect.

So you're left with choices D and E. The difference between them is that whereby that you don't see every day. This word means "in accordance with" and is therefore unnecessary: Under the provisions phrase conveys exactly the same meaning, so using whereby is a pleonasm.

This is why choice E is correct.

OK Here is much simpler version what Danaj stated above.

In GMATLand , "do it" is always wrong. You cannot refer verb with do it.

Therefore A, B, C out.

Whereby introduces subordinate clause. But we need a Independent clause.

Hence E