Citing the fact that one of their more challenging hurdles has been th

I agree with you.

In the sentence "...has been the recent [unexpected] failure of...", if you omit 'unexpected', "the recently failure of" doesn't make sense.

OA is D

https://answers.knewton.com/entries/2003 ... hat-one-of

two questions,

1. why "its" vs "their"? the subject is "team" correct? do we consider team singular, like one team, or plural as consisting of many members?
2. why had been vs has been, aren't both in the past tense?

D looks correct to me, can someone explain when past perfect is used, i tend to get confused with it...thx!

D is the clear winner here.

We need an adjective before a noun to modify the Noun.

Crick

Crick, Can you please explain why we need past perfect here. Why C would be wrong?

Can you please explain why we need past perfect here. Why C would be wrong?

When 2 events happen in the past, we use past perfect to refer to event that happened first and simple past to refer to subsequent event.

For example:
Simple Past: I called him at 8pm (Event in the past happening at a specific time)
Present Perfect: I have called him previously (Event at unspecified time in the past)
Past Perfect: He had called me twice before I called him.
(He had called me twice - Past Perfect - First Event
I called him - Simple Past - Second Event)

Here the "Unexpected Failure" is the first event and
"Applied for the funding" is the second event

I disagree with the OA. Check out this post. It's an official gmat question.

dr-tonegawa-won-the-nobel-prize-for-discovering-how-the-51882.html

The question in the post above reflects the correct usage of adverb/adjective. Likewise, in this question we need an adverb to modify the adjective unexpected, hence E should be the answer.

What is "recent" modifying -- is it unexpected or the failure? It makes more sense for the failure to be recent, than for the unexpectedness to be recent.

Recent should be the correct answer here.

Recent(adj) and unexpected (adj) both modify failures (nouns)

what is the correct answer? does an adverb always modify adjective?

The intended meaning is that the failure is recent not that the expectation is recent. The adverb "recently" wrongly modifies "unexpected", whereas the adjective "recent" correctly modifies the noun "failure".

A. 2 errors
1. The plural pronoun "their" does not agree with singular "team".
2. Present perfect "has been" is wrong - past perfect needs to be used since the verb occurs within a statement ("citing") that occurred in past - occurred before "citing".

B. 3 errors
1. The plural pronoun "their" does not agree with singular "team".
2. Present perfect "has been" is wrong - past perfect needs to be used since the verb occurs within a statement ("citing") that occurred in past - occurred before "citing".
3. Adverb "recently" is wrong as described above.

C. 1 error
1. Simple present tense " is" is wrong as described above.

D. CORRECT. Eliminates all the 3 errors described above.

E. 1 error
1. Adverb "recently" is wrong as described above.

To answer your question about adverb usage...... adverbs can be used to modify an adjective or a verb, but never a noun.

I suspect the answer is D. I have checked the same question on other websites and D is the answer.

agree with the above mentioned...looking at the low % rate of correct answers, I thought that it might be a trap for "their", modifying the compound noun "team", but it is not the case...fewh!

Could anyone please point me to the explanation why "they" cannot be used with "team"?