12 Days of Christmas GMAT Competition - Day 1: Near the end of the Cre

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

Hello, everyone. I had a lot of fun putting this question together—dinosaurs were one of my earliest fixations—and I hope to touch on a few important meaning and verb tense issues by the time we get to the end.


I say this often, and I will reiterate: read the entire sentence before you decide what the intended meaning may be. Here, we have a few clues that was thought to be cannot be correct. The first such clue occurs with the opening phrase, which, when combined with the subsequent was, places the timeline strictly in the past, as in, people near the end of the Cretaceous period thought something about the Deccan Traps. That seems a little strange, right? But just in case you missed that one—this is not Jeopardy! after all, and maybe the Cretaceous period is unfamiliar—you have a second clue about a subsequent chain of events: eruptions that led to many extinctions, including the demise of the dinosaurs. Now there is no doubt that the timeline is skewed. It is common knowledge that people did not coexist with dinosaurs, so this sort of issue is testable. With our two clues in hand, we can safely eliminate (A).


Not only is the main issue concerning the verb tense not fixed, but now we have a second problem with a double-padded idea: thought to be and could have led share similar space, and the second could be chopped down to led on its own as part of a hypothesis. The GMAT™ prefers the clear and concise expression of vital meaning, and this answer choice misses the mark.


Close, but no cigar. The problem is that the subject of the main clause is range, not the object of the preposition, volcanoes. Neither can we agree the verb with the Deccan Traps. By and large, unless you are talking about counting nouns (such as a number versus the number of something), you should look back to the noun before the preposition to dictate subject-verb agreement. Such is the case here, so we can get rid of (C).


I know that the use of the present tense, is, is the Lone Ranger of this lot of answers, but that does not disqualify its usage. That is, I have observed such a correct answer in a 1/4 split on at least one official question, so you cannot necessarily rely on how many appearances a certain split makes to determine an answer. This sentence conveys that the same unseen agent, people, now in the present, believe that several large eruptions during the Cretaceous period from the site of the Deccan Traps ended up eventually wiping out the dinosaurs. Why the present perfect have been instead of the infinitive to be? That, again, touches on when the eruptions occurred. If we replace have been with to be, then the sentence has a foot in two timelines, and the opening phrase seems detached from the information that follows. In short, there is nothing to argue against here, so it should be a safe answer to hold on to.


This is a second-best answer in my view, one that requires a careful consideration of the meaning of the sentence to disprove. However, the past tense does not work here, plain and simple. The chain of events took place in the past, not the thinking about that chain of events. Unless you are willing to argue for the notion that people and dinosaurs were walking around Earth at the same time, you have to abandon was and look for a better alternative.

I hope that helps clarify the issues. If anyone has further questions, I would be happy to address them. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew