Sentence Correction

Received a PM asking me to respond on the past perfect issue. Interesting question. So the OG explanation simply doesn't mention this issue at all?

FYI - the people who write the questions are not necessarily the same people who write the explanations. The explanations are written at a much later time, after the question is retired, so often the explanation-writer is a totally different person.

As a result, I think, I do sometimes find things that go unmentioned in exlanations when I was expecting them to be mentioned. I recently read an explanation that didn't mention an idiom that did come into play in the choices. I also sometimes find flat out errors, by the way. For the other geeks here, I recently read an explanation that said a certain word should be changed to "participle" form - except that the correct answer changed the word to the infinitive form of the verb, which is not a participle - it's a verbal (a category that includes participles). Okay, end of too-detailed-grammar-rant.

On this one, though, I could buy the argument that the past perfect vs. past split is a red herring (there to get us to waste time or cause a mistake). Basically, using past perfect is more restrictive than using past: I can ONLY use past perfect if certain conditions are met, while past is more flexible.

So if something does work with past perfect, then technically, you could also use plain past - though the plain past wouldn't be as "elegant" as past perfect. My guess is that this is why the explanation writer didn't say anything about it. And, of course, note that we don't have to deal with that particular issue in order to eliminate C, D, and E. So the fact that we never have to deal with this, even though it shows up in 3 choices - at the least, that means that the writers weren't trying to set this up as a main issue in this problem.

As I said in my earlier post - in a sentence that could take past perfect, we are allowed to use the less restrictive simple past. This isn't a case in which the sentence tries to use past perfect where it isn't justified. So I don't think we can necessarily immediately eliminate based solely on that. I'd probably decide that I preferred past perfect, but simple past wasn't technically wrong, so now I have to go look at other stuff... but, if I have to guess, I'll guess a past perfect option.

After Mary finished her homework, her mother arrived.

You don't absolutely have to use past perfect - what you do have to do is somehow indicate the sequence of events if there are multiple past events that took place at different times. Past perfect is one way to do that, but there are others.

On the other hand, if you use past perfect, you must be using it to delineate the older of two (or more) past events.

On the tense issue, when a sentence is set in the past tense (as this one is: the company announced that...) and tries to say something about that future, that needs to be in the conditional ("would") tense.

I said that I would help my sister next week-end.

I said, in the past, that I would, in the future, help my sister. Have I helped my sister yet? Nope. So it's still uncertain - anything could happen. Has the company already improved its business? Nope. So it's still uncertain.


That's just one of those rules we have to know.

Can there be some exceptions where future said in past does not use would and use some other tense ?

In English, I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to just about any rule you can think of. I'm trying to think of an exception to this one and can't right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one.

Also kindly tell whether in GMAT it is ok to use both the following sentences:

a) I think that it will rain today.
b) I think that it would rain today.

only (a) I think that it will rain today. The question is not whether it will rain later today, but whether I think right now that it will. If I really do think that right now, then we use "will."

I could also say:
I thought that it would rain today.

I thought (in the past - maybe yesterday?) that it would rain today - I'm predicting. And the implication is that it hasn't actually rained today, so I was wrong. If it had actually rained today, I'd say "I knew that it was going to rain today - I told you so yesterday!"