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Verb tenses, find the error !

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Verb tenses, find the error !

by jainpiyushjain » Fri Mar 29, 2013 9:04 pm
Hello

I came across this sentence in a verb tense exercise of a GMAT reviews handbook.

Q. Is the below sentence correctly written ?

The old gymnasium was abandoned until a real estate consortium bought the facility and renovated it.

OA Correct

My question is shouldn't we use past perfect to indicate that the gym was abandoned prior to the real estate consortium buying the facility. [/spoiler]
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Sat Mar 30, 2013 5:25 am
If the order of the past events is obvious, then we don't necessarily need to use past perfect tense.
Consider this example: Gary baked a cake and served it to his family.

Here, we have two actions that occurred in the past, and we can tell from the context that the baking occurred before the serving. So, it would seem that we should use the past perfect tense and write: Gary had baked a cake and served it to his family.

Now it isn't grammatically incorrect to write Gary had baked a cake and served it to his family, but it isn't necessary to do so since we can tell from the context that the baking must have occurred before the serving.

So, if the order of the actions is 100% obvious, we need not use the past perfect tense. Now there's no perfect rule for determining whether or not the order of certain actions is 100% obvious, so it is highly unlikely that you would ever need to determine this on a test.

What you do need to know is that, if an action is expressed in the past perfect tense form, then that action must have been completed before some other action was completed in the past.

Cheers,
Brent
Brent Hanneson - Creator of GMATPrepNow.com
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