gauravraos wrote:
The child was frightened by the grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and the clown, and was worrying ever since that the two will reappear.
A. was frightened by the grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and the clown, and was worrying
B. was frightened by the clown and the grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and worried
C. had been frightened by the grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and by the clown, and has been worrying
D. has been frightened by the clown and the by grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and worried
E. was frightened by the clown and the grifter, who had a number of unsettling mannerisms, and has been worried
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
This question has a fair amount going on, but really it's all about
tense.
The timeline of the child's "worrying" in the initial version (A) is self-contradictory. "Was worrying" is past continuous, suggesting an action that had a duration but that is no longer ongoing in the present. But "ever since" suggests the opposite -- that the child continues to worry. Since this timeline makes no sense, we can eliminate A.
B cleans up some arguable style issues from A, but ultimately B does nothing to correct the contradictory tense issue associated with "the child was... worried ever since" (this might also be read as "the child... worried ever since," but the same issue would remain).
C repairs the end of the sentence by using the present perfect continuous "has been worrying" to describe a process ongoing from the past into the present. However, C adds the past perfect "had been frightened" at the beginning, which wrecks this aspect of the timeline. The past perfect describes a past tense event that occurred before another past tense event in the sentence, but the only other past tense event here is "had a number of unsettling mannerisms," and this presumably was true at the time when the grifter and the clown frightened the child (note that "had a number of unsettling mannerisms" is simple past, not past perfect; the "had" in this context is a verb meaning "possessed," rather than a perfect tense helping verb).
D attempts to solve the "worried ever since" problem by adding the present perfect helping verb "has" at the beginning of the sentence. This does, in fact, allow the latter part of the sentence to pick up the helping "has" and make sense. However, the unintended consequence is that the child's initially being frightened is also ongoing into the present. This is illogical especially given that the unsettling mannerisms are expressed in the simple past ("had") and given that the phrase "ever since" implies a definite point strictly in the past at which the child's worry began.
E corrects the tense issue at the end of the sentence by providing the present perfect "has been worried." In the process, it correctly retains the simple past tenses elsewhere in the sentence. Therefore E is the correct answer.
Some students may get hung up on the logic of locating the relative clause "who had a number of unsettling mannerisms." Does it refer to the grifter alone or to both the grifter and the clown? Does its meaning change when the clown is moved around the sentence in answers B, D, and E? Is it even unambiguous when placed after the compound phrase "the clown and the grifter"?
In A and C, only the grifter had unsettling mannerisms. Ultimately, answers B, D, and E change the meaning to state that both the clown and the grifter had unsettling mannerisms. When a pronoun ("who") follows a list, the pronoun will unambiguously refer to the entire preceding list if possible. This does, of course, change the meaning of the sentence, but that isn't problematic. The only rule of meaning that matters to the GMAT is whether the meaning in question is logical, not whether the meaning is the same as it was in the original sentence. And it isn't illogical for either the clown, the grifter, or both to have unsettling mannerisms.
Since every answer choice is both logical and unambiguous with regard to the owner of the unsettling mannerisms, this was a false decision point designed to distract from the fundamental tense issues that only E was able to fully solve.
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