icefrog wrote:
Hi Mike, love your explanations. They're very detailed and have helped me a lot so far.
I selected option C, and I eliminated A, B & E because they did not use the past perfect form - 'had started moving'
But in your explanation, you mentioned that using it when it is obvious because of the dates, is redundant and should be avoided. According to the
MGMAT SC book this sentence is considered correct-
Right: Bv 1945. the United States HAD BEEN at war for several years.
It is very evident here that it happened before 1945. But it still used.
Also, in the link you've mentioned, the following sentence is given as an example for correct usage of the past perfect tense.
6) By the time Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, Gregor Mendel already had discovered, during his famous pea plant experiments, the genetic principles that ultimately would explain and justify Darwin’s conclusions.
Here also, it is very evident.
In my opinion, using the past perfect tense is wrong here, because of the word 'before' which makes it obvious that the action happened before the date. The galore of dates has nothing to do with this. Please tell me if I'm right here or am I missing something?
If I am right, the second example on your blog is wrong as well. Because it has the word 'already' and using the past perfect tense in that sentence, makes it redundant.
Thank you very much!
Dear icefrog,
I'm happy to respond.
My friend, here's the tricky thing. Grammar is not mathematics. Mathematics has clear black vs. white, right vs. wrong procedures and answers. Grammar is not like that: a few things are totally right or totally wrong, but there are many shades of gray.
All language depends on meaning. Too often, GMAT students focus on grammar and avoid meaning, but meaning trumps grammar. In everyday conversation and academic writer, the speaker's or author's intention gives direction and focus to the words. This is deeply true on the GMAT SC as well, and students often fail to appreciate what this implies.
The use of the past perfect tense, with respect to another past tense, is one way to convey that one past action preceded another past action. Other elements of the sentence might also indicate this. There are a few issues.
1) a rhetorically sound sentence has
clarity -- We use the past perfect in order to clarify the time-sequence, if it is not obvious that other elements would do that. In the
MGMAT sentence, if we said:
By 1945, the United States was at war. = this implies that the was some other sequence of events before 1945, but that war itself started only in 1945 (this does not correspond to the historical facts).
By 1945, the United States was at war for several years. = this sound
wrong. This is precisely what someone would say who didn't understand how to use the past perfect correctly. You see, "
for several years" is a phrase that implies that it had been happening for a while, but it's not logical definitive by itself. To use this phrase with the ordinary past is jarringly wrong. The
MGMAT version is the only correct version:
By 1945, the United States had been at war for several years. = That's a correct and logically satisfying sentence, because the expectation created by the phrase "
for several years" is matched and fulfilled by the explicit use of the past perfect tense. The whole sentence works together. A well-designed sentence can create an expectation and then fulfill it: in a way, that's one of the functions of parallelism.
2) another issue is
emotional emphasis in the sentence. Consider my sentence from the blog:
By the time Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, Gregor Mendel already had discovered, during his famous pea plant experiments, the genetic principles that ultimately would explain and justify Darwin’s conclusions.
Part of what is happening here is similar to the last sentence. The word "
already" creates an expectation, and the use of the past perfect matches and fulfills that expectation. Also, the use of the adverb "
already" with the past perfect creates a subtle emphasis. It is more subtle than, say, use of italics or bold. It just creates this small emotional nudge, as if to say: "
wow, can you believe this?" It is a subtle way to call attention to the difference in times, ultimately to the historical irony that Mendel's work on genetics actually
preceded Darwin's book. You see, the academic language of the GMAT is very understated, and when emotional emphasis of any sort appears, it's very subtle. It is much less obvious than it would be in popular writing. For example, often just a subtle emphasis will bring out the implicit irony of a situation. Many SC questions in the
OG involve some subtle degree of irony.
3) Clarity is good, but
too much clarity is bad. Let's look at version (C) of this SC question.
The preliminary agreement to what was the Treaty of Utrecht was not signed until September 1711, and the final treaty in March 1713, but the peace process had started to move before the end of 1710.
The construction "
what was the Treaty of Utrecht" is an awkward failure that lands between the correct structure "
what was to be the Treaty of Utrecht" and just the plain and simple "
Treaty of Utrecht." That's one problem with (C).
The use of the past perfect is also a problem here. Again, this is subtle. This sentence focuses on the historical sequence of events, and we have dates and years all over the place. Now, the sequence of events is very clear, almost mathematically clear. We have absolutely no doubt about what happened when, and what happened before or after what. In this environment, use of the past perfect is overkill. It crosses the line and makes things too obvious. When things are too obvious, they are
redundant, and redundant is always wrong on the GMAT.
So, you see, the boundaries here are very sophisticated and subtle, and not at all amenable to simply dichotomies --- if this is right, that is wrong. In the bigger picture, especially for a non-native speaker approaching English as a second language, you simply cannot get to mastery on GMAT SC by trying to learn some list of "rules." Yes, the rules of grammar are important, and the more deeply you can understand each one it all its nuances, the better you will understand, but ultimately, you cannot develop an "ear" for sophisticated grammar without reading. I highly recommend this blog:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2014/how-to-imp ... bal-score/Nothing replaces the habit of reading for building a deep intuition for the language.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)