GMAT Verbs: The Perfect Tense

Here's some help on the tricky perfect tense from Magoosh's Chris Lele:

Present Perfect: Has/have + Participle

Past Perfect: Had + Participle (plus another verb in the Simple Past)

Two of the most confusing tenses in English are the present perfect and the past perfect. This is because both describe continuous actions. To illustrate, let’s take a look at the following sentences:

1. Last night, I walked my dog.

2. I have walked Bucky every night for the last two years.

In the first sentence, I am doing the action, ‘walk’, only once. In the second sentence, I am describing something that has taken place on a number of occasions in the past and continues on till today (meaning tonight I will most likely walk Bucky).

The first tense is the simple past (if you look at my description it is very simple). The perfect tenses, on the other hand, aren’t so simple. To show you what I mean, let’s compare the present and the past.

Present Perfect vs. Past Perfect

1. Before I moved to California, I had walked Bucky in the mornings, not at nights.

2. Since moving to California, I have walked Bucky every evening.

The first sentence is an example of the past perfect tense. Notice, like the present perfect, that we have the verb ‘have’ coupled with another verb (which we call the participle).

Why use one tense versus the other? Well, if you notice in the first sentence, I am talking about two events that happened in the past: my walking Bucky and my moving to California. Whenever you are dealing with two events in the past, one of which started or happened before the other, you must use the past perfect tense to describe the event that started first.

First Event: I walked Bucky in the morning = Past Perfect Construction

Second Event: I moved to California = Simple Past

Another way to think of the past perfect is with specific dates. Let’s say I moved to California in 1984. I walked Bucky every morning from 1981 to 1984. The sentence implies that once I moved to California I no longer walked Bucky in the morning. That is, an event that happened repeatedly in the past stopped when another event happened. That interrupting event uses the simple past.

Practice questions:

1) The corporation suffered/had suffered from consecutive quarterly losses until it hired/had hired a new CEO.

2) Every Christmas, the CEO granted/has granted employees three days off to celebrate the holidays.


In the first sentence, the event that happened first is the corporation suffering. So we want the past perfect tense: had suffered. The more recent action, the hiring of a new CEO, should be in simple past: hired.

For the second sentence, we want to describe an event that started in the past and continues in the present. So we need to use the present perfect tense: has granted.

Key Points

• Present Perfect: Has/Have + Participle = describes action/event that happened in the past and continues in the present.
  
• Past Perfect: Had + Participle = describes an action/event in the past that happened before another action in the past.
  
• Whenever we use the past perfect, we must also have another verb in the sentence that is in the simple past.

Let us know if you have any questions about this, and we would be happy to help!