Reporting that one of their more debilitating setbacks has been the re

MEANING: The team asked for more funding, reporting that one of its major setbacks had been the recently unexpected failure.

NOTES: Who is reporting? The team - singular; What was the setback? The unexpected failure, that which happened recently. Had Been - past perfect - is used to refer to an event that happened in the past before another event in the past: [1 event] unexpected failure, [2 event] request for funding.

Ans (D)

The right answer is D.

Split #1: Their vs its
The logical referent for the pronoun their/its is the Hubble Engineering Team, which is singular. The plural pronoun their is inappropriate. We can eliminate A and B.

Split #2: is vs had been vs has been
The subject of the main clause is the Hubble Engineering Team with the verb requested, which is in simple past tense. For the verb tense to be simple present tense is, then the verb for the main clause should have been in the simple present tense requests. But since the main verb tense in the main clause is simple past, the past perfect is more appropriate. We can eliminate C based on this split. The main clause suggests an action that is completed, hence there is no justification for the use of the present perfect tense.

Split #3: recent vs recently.
recent is an adjective and in the context of this sentence modifies failure. Recently is an adverb that can only modify the adjective unexpected and this is not intended. There is no reason to use an adverb form recently when an adjective recent can appropriately modify failure. We can eliminate E and keep D as the best answer.

Reporting that one of their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent unexpected failure of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, the Hubble engineering team requested additional funding to develop more reliable instruments.

(A) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent
(B) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recently
(C) its more debilitating setbacks is the recent
(D) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recent
(E) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recently

IMO D its more debilitating setbacks had been the recent

use of its over their .. subject team is correct
and past tense had is correct

Reporting that one of [url]their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent[/url] unexpected failure of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, the Hubble engineering team requested additional funding to develop more reliable instruments.

(A) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent
(B) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recently
(C) its more debilitating setbacks is the recent
(D) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recent
(E) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recently

Reporting that one of their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent unexpected failure of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, the Hubble engineering team requested additional funding to develop more reliable instruments.

(A) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recent
(B) their more debilitating setbacks has been the recently
(C) its more debilitating setbacks is the recent
(D) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recent
(E) its more debilitating setbacks had been the recently

'Had been' and 'recent/ly' both are used for expressing same thing. Hence they can't exist with each other. Also S-V agreement needs to be corrected, here 'team-its' is correct.

IMO Answer C.

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

There are two grammatical mistakes in this sentence, one concerning the possessive pronoun "their" and one concerning the improper tense in the phrase "has been."

A good idea whenever you run into possessive pronouns like “its” or “their” is to ask to what antecedent the “its”/”their” refers. In this case, their refers to the Hubble engineering team, which is a collective noun that is grammatically singular even though it refers to a group of people. Thus, the correct pronoun should be its rather than their. This first correction narrows our answer choices down to C, D, and E.

Answer choice C is different from D and E in its use of the verb is rather than had been. When two actions take place in the past, the perfect past tense had + [past-tense verb] is used to describe the action that was completed before another past event took place (which takes the simple past). Consider the sentence "It had been raining all day, so Liz finally opened her umbrella." In this case, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph failed before the engineering team requested more funds, so both the original has been and the present tense verb is in choice C would be incorrect in this case. Thus, we’ll use had been, which corresponds to answer choices D and E.

The difference between D and E is the use of the original adjective recent (D) versus the adverb recently (E). Because this word describes the noun failure and not the adjective unexpected, and failure is a noun, recent is the better option (remember, adjectives describe nouns).

Thus, the correct answer choice is D, which corrects both the possessive pronoun and the verb tense error and keeps the correct adjective, recent.