This is another one that we covered
in our recent YouTube webinar on verb tenses, so if you prefer your SC explanations in video form, feel free to head over there. We covered some pretty nasty official examples (including
this SOB); fortunately, this one is a little bit gentler.
Quote:
(A) had expected it to and its business will improve
Whenever you see the past perfect tense on the GMAT (“had expected”), then you’ll want to look for some other “time marker” that occurs in the more recent past, generally in the form of an action in the simple past tense. And it looks like we have that here: first, analysts “had expected” profits to decline, and then the company later announced that its profits declined less than expect. Fair enough.
Trouble is, the pronoun “it” is definitely wrong. “It” could refer to “company”, but that wouldn’t make sense: the company had expected profits to decline, so we need this to say “had expected THEM to.” (A) is out.
Quote:
(B) had expected and that its business would improve
This looks pretty good. Just as in (A), the past perfect “had expected” makes perfect sense. The parallelism works, too: “and” is followed by a subordinate clause, “that its business would improve.” So that gives us the following: “The company announced
that its profits declined… and
that its business would improve in the second half of the year…” Fair enough. And the conditional “would” also makes sense, since it’s a prediction about the future that’s made in the past.
So we’ll keep (B).
Quote:
(C) expected it would and that it will improve its business
This has the same pronoun problem as (A): the first “it” needs to refer to “profits” in order for the sentence to make sense.
You could also argue that the phrase “the company announced… that it will improve its business” doesn’t correctly convey the intended meaning: as written, the phrase suggests that the company will take actions to make its business run differently, instead of simply saying that “business will improve” – which would correctly imply that revenue will improve.
And even if you’re not convinced by that last paragraph, (C) is out because of the pronoun thing.
Quote:
(D) expected them to and its business would improve
(D) isn’t a complete disaster, but it’s a crappier version of (B). First, the sentence makes much more sense with the past perfect “had expected”, because there are two actions (“expected profits to decline” and “announced that profits declined less…”) that happened at different times in the past.
Also, the parallelism isn’t great here. The parallelism marker “and” is followed by the clause “its business would improve”, and that isn’t ideal in GMAT-land. It’s not clear whether “its business would improve” is parallel to “analysts expected them to” or “its profits declined…” – both are clauses, so either would be structurally parallel, and that’s confusing.
But if “that” is included – as it is in (B) – then the parallelism is much, much clearer (see the explanation for (B) above).
So (B) is better than (D), and (D) can be eliminated.
Quote:
(E) expected and that it will have improved its business
(E) has the same verb tense problem as (D): the sentence makes more sense if we use the past perfect “had expected” to clarify the timeline of the past actions. Plus, it makes more sense to say that “business would improve” (suggesting that revenue increased) instead of “it will have improved its business” (which implies that the company will make changes to make the business itself better). That’s enough for us to prefer (B) over (E).
You can stop here. The answer is (B), and we’re done. But if you’re curious about the phrase “will have improved” – which isn’t all that important – keep reading.
You’re not going to see this very often on the GMAT – and it’s rarely a deciding factor when it does appear – but the phrase “will have + verb” suggests an action that will occur in the future, but before some “time marker” later in the future. For example, you could say “By the time my wife gives birth, I will have spent nine months in utter terror at the prospect of becoming a parent.” The phrase “will have spent” is in the future – but it occurs BEFORE the other future action (my wife giving birth). And in (E), there’s no reason to use that tense: “will have improved in the second quarter”… before what, exactly? The simpler, conditional “would” makes more sense.
And if that last paragraph didn’t strike a chord with you, no worries – you generally don’t need to worry about it on the GMAT. As long as you chose (B), life is good.
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