Reporting that one of their more crippling malfunctions has

"The engineering squad" is singular. So use of "their" in A and B is incorrect.

Now, there are 2 actions that have happened here: 1- failure of liquid cooling system; 2- Request for additional funding. Additionally, the failure happened before the request. Therefore, you need a past perfect to suitably assign time frames to the actions. So, C is out as it uses present tense "is".

D and E both use past perfect but in E, the use of adverb "suddenly" is incorrect. D is the right answer.

I too agree with D. It makes sense.

IMO C

The failure in the cooling system is a problem in the present.

narrowed down between C and D and chose D

their is incorrect when referring to the engineering squad.

"that" typically introduces a new clause. So, the malfuction and failure happened THEN the engineering squad requested additional funding.

I will go with D here. What is the OA ?

We need a perfect tense (had been) for earlier past to establish clear timelines.

1) Squad faced the failure of cooling system.
2) Squad requested additional funding.

We need to establish 1 happened before 2 and thus we use past perfect for the earlier event and simple past for the later event.

Crick

cvsmech, please post OA/OE.

Thanks.

OE:

The antecedent for the plural pronoun their is the singular the engineering squad, so this sentence displays a pronoun-antecedent agreement error. A pronoun can come before its antecedent if the pronoun is inside of a describing phrase set off by a comma at the beginning of the sentence; the noun described by the phrase and the antecedent for the pronoun must be the first noun after the comma. Collective nouns, like squad, which refer to a group that acts as a unit, are singular. The pronoun their is incorrect here.

Additionally, the verb tenses used in the sentence as it is written create an illogical sequence of events; in the past, the squad requested additional funding, so what prompted this request must have been an event that took place before before the request was made. However, a malfunction that has been the failure... uses the present perfect (has + participle), which describes an event that began in the past and may continue. An event that may continue does not describe something that came before another event that began and ended in the past.

Choice D changes their to its and has been to had been, fixing both errors. The singular it correctly refers to the singular collective noun engineering squad. The past perfect (had + participle) is always used to describe an event in the far past that came before an event that took place before another event in the more recent past. Before the team requested additional funding..., a crippling malfunction had been the failure.

Choice B retains the plural their and the incorrect has been..., failing to fix either error.

Choice C changes their to its but retains a verb tense error. The present is does not describe an action that took place before the request was made.

Choice E fixes both original errors but changes the adjective sudden to the incorrectly used adverb, suddenly. Adverbs cannot modify nouns; the failure, a noun, must be described as sudden and unexpected.

The correct answer is D.

Correct Answer is D.
S/V error in option A & B.
tense error in option C and in option E "suddenly " is incorrect.
So Answer should be D

Hi
I think it's not that the malfunction happened first, followed by the unexpected failure. As if we read the sentence and capture it's gist. It's the full sentence and not matched with the explanation
provided by you.
According to me the actual cause why had is used is as follows

REPORTING happened in past & REQUESTING happened after that
So we'll use had with the REPORTING phrase .