Hi Megha,
If u remember, i send u a pdf.."intro handout solutions.pdf"...open page no 62, it contains the detailed solution of this question....for others here is that same explanation..this is a tricky and a very good question: OA is Op E, keep patience while reading the OE
The growth of the railroads led to the abolition of local times, determined by when the sun reached the observer's meridian and differing from city to city, and to the establishment of regional times.
The sentence is correct as given. As discussed above:
...somebody determined times... INTENTIONAL so DETERMINED.
but
times differed... UNINTENTIONAL so DIFFERING
Here's the key: 'Determined' isn't a verb here. It's a PARTICIPLE: a verb form that functions as an adjective.
The local times were WEIRD (adjective).
The local times were DETERMINED (participle acting as adjective) by...
So you need to pick the second half that's also 'participle acting as adjective'. Try them both:
The local times were DIFFERED: uh oh, that doesn't work.
The local times were DIFFERING from city to city. That works. It's a 'present participle' rather than a 'past participle',
but it's the only one of the two that's a participle at all.
It's a bit tricky to answer these questions sometimes, but the main idea behind whether to choose the -ing form or the -ed form this:
When we reduce a verb to its -ing or -ed form, we must look at one and only one thing: whether the noun that it will modify is the subject or object of that verb.
The -ing form is used for DOING the action, which means SUBJECT, which means ACTIVE voice.
The -ed form is used for RECEIVING the action, which means OBJECT, which means PASSIVE voice.
Before I go further, let me offer two examples that will make things clearer as we go along:
"¢ speaking person (the -ing form)
"¢ spoken words (the -ed form)
In this type of question, we always have two elements:
"¢ a particple, which is either in the -ing or -ed form
"¢ a noun that is modified by this participle
So, using the previous examples, speaking modifies person and spoken modifies words.
The next step is to realize that these participles all come from verbs--speaking and spoken both come from the verb speak.
Now, using these examples, and applying them to the rules I mentioned at the beginning, we will notice that if we made a sentence, person would be the subject of the verb speak and words would be the object of the verb speak. Using this procedure, we can figure out whether should use the -ing or -ed form of a participle that modifies a noun. And that's it!!
Of course, this is easy when the vocabulary is easy, and we often get confused when we are using difficult vocabulary
because we sometimes don't know whether something is the subject or the object of the verb, but this procedure that
I have explained is the only sure way to get the right answer.
In our sentence here, which replaces times, and times is the object of determined, but it is the subject of differed.
Extreme Caution: I know some of you have learned that we should only use the -ing form only for
actions that are ongoing/in progress in the present, but that's simply not true. Participles have nothing to do with TENSES. We do occasionally use them correctly for past actions that were ongoing/in progress.
