Although it has long been known that agriculture developed in the

Please how ' had ' is appropriate here

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Please help me understand how past participle is fine here when the first of the 2 actions is using normal past tense

Hi....here is my analysis...

UNDERSTANDING INTENDED MEANING

Let’ break the sentence to derive the intended meaning, identifying the errors along the way:

Although it has long been known that agriculture developed in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago
and
by about 5,000 years ago reached most of Continental Europe,
it is still unclear how the spread of agriculture progressed and its effect on our ancestors.

ERRORS:

1. Verb Tense error: “By about 5000 years ago” implies the time of a past event which is over. Thus, the other event/verb “reached” must have already happened before the other event “5000 years ago” ended. Here we need to set a sequence to show which of the two past events took place first. So we need to use the past perfect “had reached” to indicate that agriculture had already reached Europe before the end of “by 5000 years ago”. Whenever you see a past time marker starting with “by …some date”, use the past perfect for the verb that follows.

2. Parallelism error:
“How the spread of agriculture progressed” should be made parallel by
“how it affected our ancestors”

INTENDED MEANING
• It has long been known that agriculture developed in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago.
• It has also long been known that by about 5000 years ago, agriculture had already reached most of Continental Europe.
• But it is still unclear
• how the spread of agriculture progressed
• and
• how it affected our ancestors.

ANSWER CHOICE ELIMINATION
Choices A, B and D can be eliminated primarily on the basis of verb tense error.
Choice E has the parallelism error.

Choice C analysis:

Although it has long been known that agriculture developed in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago and by about 5,000 years ago had reached most of Continental Europe, it is still unclear how the spread of agriculture progressed and how it affected our ancestors.

Logical
Clear
Per the intended meaning
Correct Choice.

Hi

You can refer to my reply to Shauryahanda above

Hope it helps

Hi

You can refer to my reply to Shauryahanda above

Hope it helps

Hello firsttimenoob,

Thank you for the query and sorry for the late revert.

This sentence is long indeed, but the meaning of this sentence is pretty straight-forward. The intended meaning is clear from the original sentence.

Now, the sentence has two errors - the verb tense error and the parallelism error. The latter us easy to identify and correct. So, I am not talking about this one. Let's discuss the verb tense error.

Please note that this sentence uses the phrase by about 5,000 years ago. Per the verb tense grammar rules, the usage of the expression by 1234 or by any specific event mandates the usage of the past perfect tense verb. This expression denotes a time period or an event that happened after some other event. So, this expression presents sequencing without the usage of the simple past tense verb for the latter event. For example, They had served the feast by 9 pm. This sentence implies that first, they served the feast, and then it became 9 pm.

So, going by this rule, we see that only Choice C and Choice E stand as contenders for the correct answer choice. Choice E can easily be rejected because of the un-parallel list. Hence, Choice C is the correct answer.


Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha

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