Sentence Correction

Hi All,
Once the economic and social usefulness of the motor car was demonstrated and with its superiority to the horse being proved, much of the early hostility to it in rural regions disappeared.

Since the meaning of this sentence is easy to understand, let us get to the error analysis.



Error Analysis

"the economic and social usefulness of the motor car..." is not parallel to "with its superiority to the horse...". We need to make both these entities parallel in the list. Since the first entity is in the non-underlined portion of the sentence, we need to change the second entity and get rid of the prepositional phrase construction. This will take care of the verb tense issue in the underline portion as well.

POE:

Choice A: and with its superiority to the horse being: Incorrect for the reason stated above.

Choice B: and its superiority over the horse had been: Incorrect. Use of past perfect tense is incorrect here because the economic and social usefulness of the motor car and its superiority over the horse were proved at the same time. By using "had been" with the second entity, the choice suggests that the superiority over horse was proved first and then the economic and social usefulness was demonstrated. This is not the intended meaning.

PS: Both the idioms "superiority to" and "superiority over" are correct. This choice is incorrect for incorrect verb tense.

Choice C: and its superiority to the horse: Correct. Notice that there are two words that are understood in this construction - and (once) its superiority to the (was) horse. Both these words appear in the same form earlier in the sentence. The parallelism error has been taken care of as well. Both the entities are now dependent clauses written in simple past tense.

Choice D: its superiority over the horse: Incorrect. This choice lacks "and" and hence the parallel list is distorted. Also lack of "and" makes this choice just hanging in the sentence with no proper connection to any part of the sentence.
Again, "superiority over" is not the issue in this choice.

Choice E: with its superiority to the horse having been: Incorrect. This choice repeats the same parallelism error as in Choice A and hence the use of verb tense is also incorrect here.



1. The entities in the list must be parallel.
2. The entities in the list must be connected properly.
3. Do not use past perfect tense for the events that took place in the same time line.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.
Shraddha