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I am no expert, but that sentence seems poorly written. I had to read it and re-write it in my head to say -

"Earlier today, the South announced that they had agreed in principle to begin discussing the reunions of separated families."

Subject - the South (assuming a group of southern people)

Verb - announced

Object - "that they had agreed" -- They had agreed is past perfect, because the agreement took place prior to the announcement

The original sentence is not clear. For example, "it had been announced by the South" is the passive voice version of "the South announced." It could also be the past perfect progressive stating that there was an announcement and the announcement continued until something else happened. Of course, that makes no sense.

Overall, that is a poorly written sentence in my opinion.

nadib002 wrote:I was reading "The Economist" earlier and came across the following sentence.

"Earlier today, it had been announced by the South that they had agreed in principle to begin discussions on reunions for separated families."


When I read the sentence I could figure that the sentence was about two different events:

Event 1-- South agreed in principle

Event 2-- The announcement

I anticipated the verbs to be in "Past Perfect" tense since one event follows the other and both occurred in the past( earlier today)

None of the events is in the "simple past" form ? [ had been announced -- had agreed]

Why is that so? Is my understanding correct or am i missing something?

Could you please clarify?

Thank you

"it had been announced" - passive voice (not GMAT friendly), unnecessary use of past perfect continuous tense.

If you take the sentence without the context, there is also a clear pronoun-antecedent error (it & they).
'the South' seems to be a collective noun and should be in singular form.

I am no expert, but I think it could be re-written as:

Earlier today, the South announced that it had agreed in principle to begin discussing the reunions of separated families.

Timeline:
had agreed (took place before the announcement was made) --> announced (simple past)

'the South' seems to be a collective noun and should be in singular form.

Good catch hja379! I missed that when I re-wrote the sentence.

I think "Had agreed" is wrong in this context. If you have two events in the past then you may need past perfect to say what happened first, and what happened next.

Present perfect might suit better "Has agreed".

gmat.760 wrote:I think "Had agreed" is wrong in this context. If you have two events in the past then you may need past perfect to say what happened first, and what happened next.

Present perfect might suit better "Has agreed".

Present perfect should be used when the action happened in the past and the effect still continues into present and that does not have a clear timeline.
https://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentperfect.html

Though "Earlier today" is a marker that indicates one thing happened in the past, it does not explicitly say when the agreement has been made. Since the two actions are not independent of each other, I still think it should be 'had agreed'.

Did the sentence before or after that one contain a simple past? We never get multiple sentences in context on SC, but that could make sense of the past perfect there, for additional contrast with sentences in the simple past around it.