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Past Perfect Tense Doubt - Expert Advise Needed

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Past Perfect Tense Doubt - Expert Advise Needed

by priya2gupta5 » Tue Jul 26, 2011 5:55 am
I have a hard time understanding what it means when the two events are related. In the sentence below, is past perfect required? So which one is correct?

The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria killed thousands of people.
The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria had killed thousands of people.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Explain this.
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by SticklorForDetails » Tue Jul 26, 2011 11:27 am
This is a really difficult and interesting question of English grammar. My first instinct is that the GMAT will not test the Past Perfect like this because it's controversial. Remember, all GMAT questions get vetted as experimental questions first, so any question on which high scorers would regularly disagree will be thrown out because of no clear right answer; we, in the end, are the final arbiters of whether a question is "fair," and every scored question you see on Test Day has already been proved "fair" by data.

I think that the second version (with the past perfect) is better but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's required. By placing the second action inside this modifying clause, the sequencing of the events no longer becomes central to the meaning of the sentence.

If the GMAT wanted to test this rule, they would make it unambiguous and therefore mandatory, as in:

"Bacteria had killed thousands of people during the era before penicillin was invented."

The insertion of the word "before" here sequences the events unambiguously.

Have you seen an official question similar to the example you presented? If so, what was the answer? Now I'm curious!
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by priya2gupta5 » Tue Jul 26, 2011 12:42 pm
Thanks SticklorForDetails...(I like your name!!)

I actually was thinking about the following OG sentences:

The company announced that its profits declined much less in the second quarter than analysts had expected and its business will improve in the second half of the year.

His studies of ice-polished rocks in his Alpine homeland, far outside the range of present-day glaciers, led Louis Agassiz in 1837 to propose the concept of an age in which great ice sheets had existed in what are now temperate areas.

And was wondering about the related events and unrelated events concept. How to tell which events are related and which are not...

So from that aspect I came up with the sentence in my previous post..Can you please guide me...
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by lunarpower » Sat Jul 30, 2011 12:58 am
priya2gupta5 wrote:Thanks SticklorForDetails...(I like your name!!)

I actually was thinking about the following OG sentences:

The company announced that its profits declined much less in the second quarter than analysts had expected and its business will improve in the second half of the year.
this is one of the wrong answers from that problem. check your source.
His studies of ice-polished rocks in his Alpine homeland, far outside the range of present-day glaciers, led Louis Agassiz in 1837 to propose the concept of an age in which great ice sheets had existed in what are now temperate areas.
this is og12 #70. PLEASE post the whole problem when you cite a problem. thanks.

in that problem, "had existed" is changed to "existed".
the best explanation for that change is the fact that the sentence talks about now temperate areas -- in other words, referring to the present. so, even though agassiz did his work in 1837, the theory is described in the present tense, as it relates to the current situation. in that scenario -- a sentence written from the standpoint of the present -- the past perfect tense shouldn't be used.

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another question:
can you already identify pronoun errors, modifier placement errors, non-parallelism, and subject-verb disagreement 100% of the time?
if you can't, then you should stop studying verb tense, at least for the moment. verb tense is much more difficult for non-native speakers than just about any other aspect of language, so your odds are better if you perfect your ability to spot those other types of errors first.
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by mundasingh123 » Sat Jul 30, 2011 5:30 am
the best explanation for that change is the fact that the sentence talks about now temperate areas -- in other words, referring to the present. so, even though agassiz did his work in 1837, the theory is described in the present tense, as it relates to the current situation. in that scenario -- a sentence written from the standpoint of the present -- the past perfect tense shouldn't be used.
Ron , you said the past perfect shouldnt be used when when a sentence is written from the standpoint of the present . so is the use of the past perfect warranted here ?

The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria killed thousands of people.

The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria had killed thousands of people.
In this case the past perfect is required because we are considering the statement from the standpoint of the past when the invention of penicillin ended the era
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by lunarpower » Mon Aug 01, 2011 2:43 am
mundasingh123 wrote:The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria killed thousands of people.
The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria had killed thousands of people.
either of these could work, depending on emphasis. if these things are just presented as historical events, with no particular emphasis, then the first is ok; if the author means to place especial emphasis on the cumulative death toll by the end of the era (...had killed X number of people by the time the era ended), then the latter is ok.
they won't split this sort of thing on the test.

also, see the warning in the post above yours re: verb tenses -- you shouldn't be studying them unless you can identify those other, more common errors every time you see them, without fail.
are you at that point yet?
if not, you are better off improving your ability to spot those things first, and turning back to verb tenses only once you have perfected those other skills.
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by priya2gupta5 » Tue Aug 02, 2011 1:37 pm
Understood Sir Ron :)
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by mundasingh123 » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:09 pm
lunarpower wrote:
mundasingh123 wrote:The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria killed thousands of people.
The invention of penicillin ended the era in which bacteria had killed thousands of people.
either of these could work, depending on emphasis. if these things are just presented as historical events, with no particular emphasis, then the first is ok; if the author means to place especial emphasis on the cumulative death toll by the end of the era (...had killed X number of people by the time the era ended), then the latter is ok.
they won't split this sort of thing on the test.

also, see the warning in the post above yours re: verb tenses -- you shouldn't be studying them unless you can identify those other, more common errors every time you see them, without fail.
are you at that point yet?
if not, you are better off improving your ability to spot those things first, and turning back to verb tenses only once you have perfected those other skills.
Hi Ron so this means that verb tenses will not be the only errors present in an SC on the GMAT , verb tense errors could be present in combination with the other kind of errors
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by lunarpower » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:41 am
mundasingh123 wrote:Hi Ron so this means that verb tenses will not be the only errors present in an SC on the GMAT , verb tense errors could be present in combination with the other kind of errors
that's not what i said -- did you read the post to which i referred you?

the point of that warning was that verb tenses are much, much more difficult for non-native speakers than just about any other error type. (this is not just a feature of english -- this is a feature of every language in the world.) therefore, you should assign them a lower priority than those other topics, of which you have a much greater chance of achieving mastery.

remember that SC is a game of priorities -- you can't reasonably hope to learn and recall everything with equal priority. if you try to learn everything, you'll remember almost nothing.
the idea, then, is to give high priority to a few topics and low priority to the rest, so that you can optimize your performance. if you are not a native speaker of english, then verb tense is one of the topics to which you should give a lower priority.
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by mundasingh123 » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:47 am
Ron , How much priority should be given to the VAN concepts explained in the advanced section of MGMAT SC . could we apply those rules to every SC ? LOL
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by lunarpower » Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:58 am
mundasingh123 wrote:Ron , How much priority should be given to the VAN concepts explained in the advanced section of MGMAT SC
in general, anything classified as "advanced" is less important than anything classified as "general". this is true for everyone, regardless of current performance level.

when you see the word "advanced", you should read it as "rare and specialized topics that are not worth your trouble unless you have 100% mastered EVERYTHING in the general sections".
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by mundasingh123 » Thu Aug 04, 2011 4:04 am
Ron , Cases in which the modifier was placed away from the noun always left me confused until i came across the section that dealt with modifiers in the Advanced Section . I think the advanced section is as important as the the section that precedes it .
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