In 1922, when Truman was almost forty years old, he was living in his

In 1922, when Truman was almost forty years old, he was living in his mother-in-law's house, watching the haberdashery store he opened three years earlier go bankrupt, and he faced a future with no visible prospects.

(A) opened three years earlier go bankrupt, and he faced
(B) opened three years earlier go bankrupt and faced
(C) had opened three years earlier go bankrupt, and he was facing
(D) had opened three years earlier go bankrupt, and facing
(E) was opening three years earlier going bankrupt, and facing


This is a simple sentence in technical parlance with an IC followed by a compound modifier. comprising two present participles.

The template of this sentence is that someone was living in his mother in law's house, watching X and facing Y.
As per the conventions of parallelism, one is required to drop the pronoun in the second clause, if the subject of the first clause can stand as the subject of the second. A repetition of either a noun or a pronoun is considered superfluous and redundant in such situations. We can remove choices A and C on this score alone.
We can eliminate E for using the past progressive 'he was opening'.
Choice B is out for using an unparallel past tense verb for the second clause, which is not parallel to either 'was living' in the first clause or to the first modifier 'watching'.
Choice D survives ultimately by using the parallel modifiers 'watching' and 'facing'. The only Achilles' tendon is the use of a comma before the conjunction 'and' connecting the second modifier, but that is okay I suppose, as punctuations are not critically tested in GMAT.
It is a moot point whether a simple past tense is okay or a past perfect is required as they are not playing a make or break role in the context.

I vote D.
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Correct answer: D

This question is mainly testing parallelism. The correct parallel structure repeats the past progressive by repeating the participles as follows: "he was living ..., watching ...., and facing."

A: Incorrect because it uses the simple past "faced" and because it repeats the pronoun "he" (which is omitted in the second item in the list).
B: Incorrect because it uses the simple past "faced."
C: Incorrect because it repeats the pronoun "he," as in A.
D: Correct.
E: Incorrect because it wrongly uses the past progressive to refer to Truman opening his haberdashy, an action that the sentence signals as completed when Truman was watching it close.
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this sentence has a list of three things : "Living, watching, and facing". So we can easily eliminate ABC. The verb tense "was opening" is misused here, we do not have two actions that happened at the same time in the past. So it leaves me with option D, the best one.

Precisely because of the punctuation mark issue in choice D, I voted for choice C, considering "he was living in his mother-in-law's house" and "he was facing a future with no visible prospects" two IC linked by "and".

UNFORTUNATELY missed parallelism mistake.....

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but we are told when timeline is given, there is no specific need for us to use ‘had’. then why are we using it here?