harsh497 wrote:
Hi
KarishmaB GMATNinja AndrewNCould you please explain why option D is wrong?
Thank you!
Hello,
harsh497. It looks as if Karishma beat me to answering the first question, but I see you had a follow-up question.
harsh497 wrote:
How do we know that we are just talking about a particular time in the past?
I think you may be overlooking the word
contemporary in the non-underlined part of the sentence. Its presence conveys that Mott and Stanton lived
during the same time period as the women of the nearby Iroquois Indian nations. Unless the sentence added a bit to inform us that Mott and Stanton, who may have become aware that their ideals were borrowed,
changed something or took a different course of action, there would be no reason to use the past perfect tense to create two distinct timelines. In Sentence Correction, you have to look at what you are given in isolation, without further information either before or after the sentence in question. Take a look at the sentence with answer choice (C) inserted.
Quote:
It is possible that early American women’s rights leaders such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton borrowed their ideals from the women who lived in the contemporary Iroquois Indian nations nearby.
As a standalone sentence, and at a barebones level, this sentence expresses that two women may have borrowed ideals from other women who lived nearby. There is nothing to argue against, in terms of the verb tense or meaning. It is not that other sentences could not work, but (C) is a sure bet.
Thank you for thinking to ask me about the question on the whole. Perhaps it makes more sense now.
- Andrew