Sentence Correction

Received a PM asking me to reply. If we were to read it as:

"raised hopes for X <a recovery finally underway>"

Is that what we were hoping for? A "recovery finally underway"? What does that mean? If we just want to talk about what we're hoping for, we're hoping for a recovery.

If we want to get more complicated, we could also say that we hope that something is true: that a recovery was finally underway. But we actually have to spell that out - I'm not just hoping for a noun: recovery. I'm hoping that something is true about that recovery - that it has already started.

The other thing you can use here (and I don't know why the explanation doesn't say this): answer E changes the tense. Now, we could write this sentence using present perfect or we could write it using past - both are okay. But they do mean two different things, obviously: present perfect means it's still true that the hopes are raised and simple past means it was just in the past. We're supposed to stick with the original meaning... so don't pick E.

I picked E because it did not have a past participle, which is not needed since no two past events are involved in this sentence.

From the way that you worded this, I think you may be misunderstanding what a past participle is and when it is used.

"no two past events" seems to refer to the past perfect tense. That tense is used when there are two past events that took place at separate points in time. The past perfect tense is used to indicate the earlier of the two events.

Past perfect is constructued by using the verb "had" plus the past participle of whatever verb you want to use. This is only ONE way in which a past participle is used.

You can also use a past participle in the present perfect tense. That is constructed using "has" or "have" plus the past participle. This tense is used to indicate something that started in the past but is still true or still happening today. A surge in my practice test score has raised my hopes that I am improving. I took the practice test yesterday, and my hopes were raised then, but my hopes are still raised today - it's still true today that my hopes were raised yesterday. We can use present perfect to indicate that kind of meaning.

You can also use a past participle by itself to indicate a modifier, by the way. Basically - a past participle does not only indicate the past perfect tense; there are a lot of ways to use a past participle.