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verb tense

by resilient » Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:42 am
I am having trouble understanding when which verb tense is to be used.
Can anyone explain which tense is to be used from the given sentece.

Native American burial sites dating back 5000 years idicate that the residents at maine at that time part of a widespread culture of Algonquin-speaking people.

a. same
b. had been part of a widespread culture of a widespread culture pf people who were algonquin speaking
c. were people who were part of a widespread culture that was algonquin speaking
d. had ben people who were part of a widespread culture that was algonquin speaking
e. were people which had been part of a widespread, algonquin speaking culture.


The correct answer is A however I picked B because they "spoke it then and do not speak the language any more", My hunch on things is that I am not understanding the correct part of the sentence to attach the right verb tense to.
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Re: verb tense

by Stuart@KaplanGMAT » Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:54 am
Enginpasa1 wrote:I am having trouble understanding when which verb tense is to be used.
Can anyone explain which tense is to be used from the given sentece.

Native American burial sites dating back 5000 years idicate that the residents at maine at that time part of a widespread culture of Algonquin-speaking people.

a. same
b. had been part of a widespread culture of a widespread culture pf people who were algonquin speaking
c. were people who were part of a widespread culture that was algonquin speaking
d. had ben people who were part of a widespread culture that was algonquin speaking
e. were people which had been part of a widespread, algonquin speaking culture.


The correct answer is A however I picked B because they "spoke it then and do not speak the language any more", My hunch on things is that I am not understanding the correct part of the sentence to attach the right verb tense to.


First we need to choose between "had been" and "were".

We only use "had been" if we want the double past - in other words, if we're describing a past event in relation to a more recent past event.

For example:

I had been hungry before I ate lunch.

Lunch is the most recent past event. Since "hungry" happened before "lunch", we use the double past (or past perfect, if you care about grammar lingo).

In the question you provided, there are only two time frames: "indicate" which shows that we're starting in the present and "were" which shows that the people lived there in the past. There's no intervening action, so we need to use the simple past. "Were" is correct, "had been" is wrong: eliminate (b) and (d).

Both (c) and (e) say "were people", which is redundant in this sentence (we know they were people from the rest of the language): eliminate (c) and (e).

Choose (a), the only answer left!

(There are other errors with (b) through (e) as well, but for SC, once we find one mistake, we can throw out the entire choice.)
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