Question #56 - OG12

deep.amangmat wrote:I have a very basic doubt in Question 56. Here is the correct answer:

Many of the earliest known images of Hindi deities in India date from the time of the Kushan Empire and were fashioned either from the spotted sandstone of Mathura or from Gandharan grey schist.

My doubt is pertaining to verb tenses.
Why is it ok to use two different verb tenses here when we are talking about the same subject and are really presenting two facts about that subject.

Are the deities still not fashioned from a and b.
Why use past tense for fashioned?

I know this is the official answer and we should not doubt its correctness but I just want to understand the verb arrangement here.

Thanks

Aman

Usage of fashioned is correct because the deities were beautified in the past, we are not currently beautifying the deities.....

Hey Aman,

Thanks for the invite to chime in here! Really good question, and I think it brings up a pretty important point:

Verb tense logic on the GMAT only requires the tenses to be LOGICAL, not parallel or "the same". Your job is to determine whether the verbs indicate a logical timeline.

Here, it's the essence of these images that they date from the time of the Kushan Empire. They DO date back to that point in time...it's not that they once DID and that somehow stopped. I guess it's the same as saying:

Barack Obama is a native American citizen, having been born in Hawaii.

He IS American...that's just who he is; but the reason for it is that he WAS BORN, a one time event, in Hawaii back in the 60s.


In this question "date from the time" is a current, indicative attribute, so that's a logical tense to use. But the "were fashioned" is something that has stopped - it must be in the past since these earliest known images aren't currently being fashioned.

Again, the key is just that the tenses be logical. You could just as easily rewrite this to have two indicative tenses:

Many of the earliest known images date back to the Kushan Empire and are composed mainly of the spotted sandstone of Mathura...

For verb tense issues, I'd suggest first eliminating anything that's illogical (wait...that couldn't have happened in that order) and then do a second pass looking at differences between items.

I hope that helps...