Sentence Correction

i received a private message about this post.

confuse mind wrote:1. All the choices contain the pronoun 'it', which I feel does not have an unambiguous antecedent

it's clear from context that "it" refers to the play.

yes, there's another singular noun in the sentence, but that's not a problem if the context makes it clear which noun is the actual antecedent. (in other words, the presence of a singular pronoun doesn't require you to obliterate every other singular noun in the whole sentence; it only requires you to have a sentence in which the antecedent is clear.)

2. Secondly, it should be in passive - play does not close itself, it is closed by someone.

right, but "close" can also be used in this sort of way. for instance, it's ok to say that a grocery store closes at 10:00 p.m.

Gaurav 2013-fall wrote:I marked C since it sounded better than D. Please post the OA.

two things very, very wrong here:

1/
if you are not a native speaker of english, you won't be able to judge "what sounds good".

2/
what "sounds good" is irrelevant; this is a test of written english, not a test of spoken english.

--

in any case, the different between "after only X amount of time" and "only after X amount of time" is huge.
* in the first of these, "only" is placed directly in front of the time interval -- signaling that the time interval is unusually short, or shorter than expected.
* in the second, "only" is placed in front of "AFTER time x" -- thus indicating that something happens only after this much time has elapsed, i.e., implying that the time interval is unusually or unexpectedly long.

for instance:
James quit studying for the gmat after only 10 minutes
--> implies that 10 minutes is an awfully short time to study for the test.
but...
julie hung up the phone only after 10 minutes of hearing it ring and ring.
--> implies that 10 minutes is an awfully long time to listen to an unanswered call ring before hanging up.