Hi,
Due to the fact that Greg wrecked his family's station wagon during a road trip last summer,
he has not been and probably never would be allowed to drive his father's car.
The only error in this sentence is the verb tense error. Use of “would’ is incorrect here. Conditional “would” is used when the sentence talks about a hypothetical situation, an assumption or any expectation about the future as all these three conditions involve uncertainty. For example: The investors are expecting that the market would improve in the next couple of days.
Use of “would” is correct here because the sentence talks about the expectation of the investors. It is not sure whether the market will really improve or not. Due to the uncertainty of a future event, use of “would” is correct.
In this sentence, it is almost certain that Greg will never be allowed to drive his father’s car in the future. I say almost only because of the presence of “probably” in the sentence. Use of “would” is incorrect here because there is no uncertainty about the fact whether Greg will be allowed to drive his father’s car or not. There is no hypothetical situation here, no assumption and not even any kind of expectation involved in this sentence.
POE:
A: Wrong as discussed.
B: Correct answer. This answer choice uses the correct verb tense as well as the correct parallel structure. Notice that the use of “never” before “will be allowed” is absolutely correct. “never” is an adverb that modifies the verb “will be allowed”. So it is correct to place it before “will be allowed”.
C: Wrong.
i. Same verb tense error as in A.
ii. “has not be allowed to drive” is ungrammatical.
D: Wrong. Same error as in C.
E: Wrong: Same error as in C.
1. Use conditional "would" only when the sentence talks about a hypothetical situation, an expectation about the future or an assumption.
2. The entities in a parallel list must be grammatically as well as logically parallel.
3. The words that are not "repeated" in the sentence must be present in the sentence somewhere in its original form and must not make the sentence ungrammatical.
The concepts covered in this sentence have been covered in
e-gmat concepts:
1. Level 2 - Conditional "Would"
2. Level 1 - Parallelism - Identify and Correct
3. Level 1 - Parallelism - Helpful Tips
Thanks.
Shraddha
Sorry but I do not agree with your explanation. The use of 'probably' is clearly a hypothetical stance and precisely the reason why A should not be the answer as we need 'would instead of will. B should be the correct answer.