gmatassassin88 wrote:
generis wrote:
Although the company's executives have admitted that there had been accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue, as well as of failure to record expenses, they could not yet say precisely how much money was involved.
A) the company's executives have admitted that there had been accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue, as well as of failure to record
B) the company's executives admitted that there had been accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue and failure to record
C) the company's executives, admitting accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue and failure in recording
D) admission by the company's executives was made of accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue and failure in recording
E) admission by the company's executives that there had been accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue and failure in recording
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HI
VeritasKarishmaChiranjeevSinghGMATNinjaGMATCoachBenI hAVE DOUBT W.R.T 'TENSE'.As per my understanding present perfect tense ' have' is correctly used in option A, whereas in option B since proper timeline is not mentioned as to when CEO admitted accounting irreegularities, usage of simple past tense is incorrect.
Kindly help in understanding how option B is correct. It seems to be a deterministic error
First, let's look at a stripped-down version of (B):
"Although the company's executives admitted [X], they could not yet say precisely how much money was involved."
This is completely fine. It's just a simple past main verb ("
could not yet say") coupled with a simple past verb in the "although" clause ("admitted"). This is no different in structure than something like this:
"Even though Tim did not admit to any wrongdoing, he still agreed to pay the fine."
Do we know the exact sequencing of the two past actions here ("did not admit" and "agreed")? Not really. All we know is that the two actions occurred sometime in the past, and we don't really care about the order, if any.
The same is true in choice (B). We have two simple past verbs, and we don't really care about the order. But notice that we also get a past perfect verb in choice (B): "there
had been accounting irregularities..." So a logical interpretation is that "admitted" and "could not say" happened at some point in the past, while "had been" happened BEFORE those two past actions.
SanjaySrini wrote:
Hi,
In B, how is "reporting of revenue and failure to record expenses " parallel , failure has a verb in it while reporting is gerund.
Both "reporting" and "failure" function as nouns here. The sentence says that the irregularities included two things:
reporting of revenue and
failure to record expenses. You're correct that "reporting" is a gerund, but that's just a specific type of noun; "failure" is also a noun. So these are perfectly parallel.
I hope that helps!