Following the company’s annual meeting yesterday,

Following the company’s annual meeting yesterday, the office supervisors told the employees that they would be receiving a bonus for the increased profits this year.

A. told the employees that they would be receiving
B. had told the employees to expect
C. have told the employees that they will be receiving
D. told the employees they will receive
E. told the employees to expect

A. told the employees that they would be receiving (Not clear what is the antecedent for Pronoun "they ")
B. had told the employees to expect (Past Perfect verb usage incorrect)
C. have told the employees that they will be receiving (indicator "yesterday" tells us that simple past tense should be used)
D. told the employees they will receive ("will" changes the meaning of the sentence and makes it sound certain)
E. told the employees to expect (Correct : addresses all the errors)

In A,C and D, "they" may refer to the supervisors or to the employees. There is a pronoun reference error. Although E changes the meaning, E is better option among the choices given.

OFFICIAL VERITAS PREP SOLUTION

Correct answer is (E)
As soon as you see pronouns in the underlined or non-underlined portion, you should focus on those as a primary decision point.
In this example, three of the answer choices contain a pronoun (“they” in (A), (C), and (D)) and the others do not. Whenever you are given this omission of pronouns in certain answer choices, you should consider the possibility of a reference error, as the pronouns might be problematic.

In (A), (C), and (D) it is unclear whether “they” is referring to the supervisors or the employees. Clearly the intent of the sentence is for “they” to refer to employees, but maybe this is a mean spirited group of supervisors who like to call meetings and the let their employees know that they, as supervisors, are making more money! Because of the reference error, you can eliminate those three choices.

In (B), the past perfect “had told” creates an illogical timeline as the sentence is referencing a particular point in the past “following” an event, not before one.

Correct answer is (E) which uses the proper tense and eliminates the reference error by using an infinitive structure after “employees” instead of using a pronoun.

Dear Experts,
GMATNinja mikemcgarry IanStewart VeritasKarishma daagh abhimahna @empowergmat egmat EMPOWERgmatRichC AjiteshArun

While answering this question, I assumed that the pronoun, "they", was referring to the closest noun "employees".
In addition to that, I think that the change in the sentence from "they would be receiving" to "to expect" alters the meaning slightly.
Because of the above two reasons, I rejected option E and selected option A.

Can you please throw some light on the above question with respect to above points.

Hello Everyone!

Let's tackle this question, one thing at a time, and narrow down our choices to find the right one! To begin, let's take a quick look at the original question and highlight any major differences between the options in orange:

Following the company’s annual meeting yesterday, the office supervisors told the employees that they would be receiving a bonus for the increased profits this year.

A. told the employees that they would be receiving
B. had told the employees to expect
C. have told the employees that they will be receiving
D. told the employees they will receive
E. told the employees to expect

After a quick glance over the options, there are two areas we can focus on:

1. told vs. have/had told (Verb Tense)
2. to expect / that they would be expecting / they will receive / that they will be receiving (Pronouns)

Let's start with #1 on our list: verb tenses. No matter which one we choose, we'll eliminate 2-3 options rather quickly. We are dealing with 3 different verb tenses here, and they all mean something different:

told = Past Tense = All the events happened in the past, and around the same time
(This makes logical sense given the rest of the sentence's context.)
have told = Present Perfect Tense = You told them in the past, and continue telling them today
(This doesn't really work for this sentence. The meeting happened yesterday, and employees were told right after the meeting...which is also in the past. Why would the company still be telling employees today?)
had told = Past Perfect Tense = This event happened before another past event
(This makes no logical sense. How could the company tell the employees about the bonus BEFORE the meeting happened? There is no way that the announcement would happen in that order.)

The only verb tense that makes sense here is past tense, so let's eliminate any options that don't use past tense:

A. told the employees that they would be receiving
B. had told the employees to expect
C. have toldthe employees that they will be receiving
D. told the employees they will receive
E. told the employees to expect

We can eliminate options B & C because they use the wrong verb tenses, which create illogical meanings.

Now that we have it narrowed down a bit, let's tackle #2 on our list: Pronouns. We need to make sure any pronouns we find are used correctly. They need to be clearly referring back to only one possible antecedent, and they need to agree with the antecedent in number. Let's see how they break down:

A. told the employees that they would be receiving

This is INCORRECT because the pronoun "they" is too vague. It's not clear to readers if the pronoun "they" is referring to the supervisors or the employees.

D. told the employees they will receive

This is also INCORRECT because the pronoun "they" is too vague. It's not clear to readers if the pronoun "they" is referring to the supervisors or the employees.

E. told the employees to expect

This is CORRECT! By eliminating the vague pronoun, it's now clear that the employees are the ones getting the raise.


There you have it - option E is the correct choice! It uses the right verb tense and doesn't contain any vague pronouns.


Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.

The text of the question (both the stem and the right answer) seems to have been copied almost verbatim from this university website:

https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/proref.htm

which explains how to use pronouns correctly.

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