ranjithreddy.k9 wrote:American's love affair with the Mustang is readily apparent: few americans have been known to have driven it for the first time without taking it for another spin.
A) few americans have been known to have driven it
B) few having been known to drive it
C) few americans have been known to drive it
D) it has been driven by few americans
E) few americans having driven it
OA will be posted later.Please discuss each answer choice in detail
C it is here. The battle seems to be between C and A, so I'll just address that. One thing that makes this sentence trickier to think about is that we've got "have been known" as a passive present perfect construction... and the fact that it's passive is totally irrelevant to the discussion here... so let's change it to active present perfect just to make it easier to examine. If we do that,
(A) becomes something like "I have known few to have driven it" and
(C) becomes something like "I have known few to drive it"
So the knowing is already in a perfect tense, and we *don't* need to situate the driving at a point that falls even deeper in the past, so there's no need for the perfect infinitive "to have driven."
It's perhaps still simpler to think about if you replace "known...to" with "seen." (Then seen will take the infinite of whatever verb follows -- specifically, the version of the infinitive that drops the "to.") Would you say
(A) I have seen few have driven it or
(C) I have seen few drive it
Certainly (C), because the driving and seeing are contemporaneous. The driving (or whatever verb you put there) refers to what you "have seen," so it is by default in the timeframe established by "have seen." If you want to keep it in that timeframe, you just use the regular simple infinitive. Only if you need to situate it in an even earlier timeframe to you go into perfect infinitive for it -- in which case it becomes a perfect of a perfect.
On a different and minor note, there's another error in the original sentence: it should start
Americans' rather than
American's, since this is a plural possessive (the love affair belongs to plural Americans).
