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Noting that its revenues had fallen due to a recent prolonge

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Noting that its revenues had fallen due to a recent prolonge

by saranshpuri » Wed Apr 30, 2014 1:07 pm
Noting that its revenues had fallen due to a recent prolonged slump in CD sales, the music-store chain announced that it would be forced to raise prices at all of its outlets.

(A) its revenues had fallen due to a recent

(B) its revenues have fallen due to a recently

(C) its revenues are falling due to a recently

(D) their revenues are falling due to a recent

(E) their revenues had fallen due to a recent

OA is A , but my question is why cant we use Present perfect so as to emphasize the effect of falling revenue on sales. plz explain
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by KevinRocci » Thu May 01, 2014 10:28 am
Happy to help! :)
saranshpuri wrote:Noting that its revenues had fallen due to a recent prolonged slump in CD sales, the music-store chain announced that it would be forced to raise prices at all of its outlets.

(B) its revenues have fallen due to a recently

OA is A , but my question is why cant we use Present perfect so as to emphasize the effect of falling revenue on sales. plz explain
I eliminated all the answer choices, except for the one with present perfect. The here, and with all other verb tenses, is to understand what they are for. Verb tenses are not for placing emphasis on something. You said that you want to use present perfect to emphasize the effect of falling revenue. This is not what a verb tense does.

Verb tenses are for separating events in time. Verb tenses allow us to talk about multiple events that took place, or are taking place, at different points of time. That's it.

So the present perfect allows us to talk about an event or action that happened at some time before now. The exact time is not important. And actually the time should not be specified.

The past perfect allows us to talk about an event or action that happened before another event or action in the past. It can also show that something happened before a specific time in the past.

Now, if we look at our sentence, what scenario do we have? An event that took place some time before now? Or an event that took place before another action?

Well it's the second one. We need to distinguish between two events in time. One event was the drop in revenue and the other was the change that the store took. In this case we need to use past perfect to make clear what happened first and what happened afterwards.

Does that make sense?

I hope I was able to help a little bit! :)

Happy studying!
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