Everything offered for sale at the auction, including office furniture

Hello, kntombat. I pride myself on being honest and providing a candid assessment of a question, regardless of the source, and this question misses the mark for me. Sure, there are some interesting discussion points, but some of the details are off, as I will discuss below.


This is a basic subject-verb agreement error. The subject of the sentence is everything, and, as odd as it may seem, the all-encompassing word takes a singular verb agreement. If you fell for the trap, then consider cutting out or jumping over information contained by double commas. You can spot such subject-verb agreement errors that way, often within seconds, even if the sentence is long-winded.


To be clear, nothing is wrong with the tail-end of this option. Saying, everything was assessed is fine. But like suggests a comparison, as though artists who may paint in the style of Chagall and Picasso have submitted work for this particular auction. If this interpretation were correct, then the sentence would be saying that Chagall and Picasso themselves had no artwork in the auction. To be honest, we really have nothing to lean on to make a proper judgment on who may have produced this artwork. Why? Because despite beliefs to the contrary, the original sentence does not express the intended meaning, at least not the part that is underlined. The part of the sentence we cannot negotiate with simply tells us the following:

Everything offered for sale at the auction, including office furniture, computers, books, and... by the firm of Bloom and Kapoor.

How can I possibly tell what type of auction this may be? Just because a firm is involved, I cannot assume that the artwork on auction must be by famous artists. In fact, because Chagall and Picasso lived some time ago, it is quite possible that other artists within or after the Romantic or Cubist movements incorporated stylistic elements of Chagall and Picasso. Sometimes the works of these lesser-known artists can still fetch plenty of money at auction. All of this is to say that like in this answer choice is debatable, but by no means can we declare it incorrect.


Remember, an -ing modifier without a comma should modify the preceding noun, so here, we understand that the artwork on display is by artists such as Chagall and Picasso. There is no confusion whatsoever about whose work is going on the auction block. As for the present perfect has been, again, nothing is wrong with either this construct or the simple past construct that was used in the previous answer choice. For those who may be confused, consider a parallel sentence:

The meat for sale has been inspected by the FDA, so it is deemed safe for consumption.

This sort of quality assurance statement is used to mitigate doubts in the mind of the potential buyer. Using the simple past was is a little weaker, suggesting that the meat may have been inspected at some point and deemed safe for consumption, but perhaps too much time has passed, and that is no longer the case. The present perfect fills in the gap in time, so a buyer feels more confident that the inspection results still hold. Likewise, in the sentence at hand, the present perfect tense would indicate to potential buyers that the firm of Bloom and Kapoor had appraised the artwork recently enough for the appraisals to be valid. There is nothing to argue against in this sentence, so it is an option to keep.


This is another perfectly legitimate sentence, but, like (B), it falls into a grey area of expressed meaning. Can we say that just because the other sentences in the underlined portion only convey that the artwork was or has been appraised by a certain firm, it must be true that such an appraisal could not be conducted after the auction? No, not at all. For all we know, appraisals were made beforehand by other, perhaps less prestigious firms or individual experts, but in order to (once again) provide buyers peace of mind, the auction house has decided to run everything by the firm of Bloom and Kapoor for a second, conclusive, opinion, post-auction.


Phew, another easy one, in light of the three above. I do not feel the need to discuss like again, and were is just as incorrect as have was in (A). Get rid of this answer right away.

So there you have it. The safest answer of the bunch is (C). But there is nothing outright wrong with either (B) or (D), which is why I merely drew attention to the more debatable elements. This is a useful question insofar as it brings up differences between like and such as or including (with no comma), as well as the subtle difference between the simple past tense and the present perfect tense. But you should feel confident selecting an answer based on what is not underlined, on the contextual clues provided in the shell of the sentence, and, for reasons discussed at length above, I feel that this question fails on the whole. There are three valid answers. One of them happens to be a little less questionable than the others. I would rate this a 5/10. The points it broaches are interesting and worth studying, but the set of answers is poor.

I hope that helps. I would be happy to discuss any contrary opinions or further questions anyone may have.

- Andrew