shabuzen102 wrote:
Dear Expert,
I'd like to get some clarifications with this question. Yes, it's about the past perfect tense again.
1. How can we be certain that the action of acceleration happens before the announcement? Couldn't it happen at the same time?
2. If the answer to the above question is that something has to happen before you say it happens, then what about examples of sentences we say all the time, "He knew he was right" "He said he saw the car coming in" etc. Shouldn't they be "He knew he had been right" and "He said he had seen the car coming in" etc.?
3. From a few creditable resources (Manhattan and
Magoosh), we've acknowledged that we wouldn't have to use past perfect if that tense is understood from the context. If by using "said" to describe an action, we should immediately know that that action must have happened before saying. That means the past perfect tense is understood. Then wouldn't "had accelerated" be redundant?
4. If reported speech in the past requires past perfect tense for the thing described, then is it the general rule that there's not EVER any question that uses perfect tense in both, and something like "The authority said that the economy slowed down" or "The officials reported that people liked the recent data" would always be wrong?
Thank you!
Sorry for the delay!
It wouldn't really make sense for the action of acceleration to start at EXACTLY the same time as the announcement. How can you announce something that hasn't happened yet?
Now we can certainly announce an
ongoing process, but in that case we would want something like, "The Federal Reserve announcement said that growth
was accelerating..." - that would imply that the acceleration was still happening at the time of the announcement, but we don't have that option here.
As for your examples, "He knew he was right," actually conveys a slightly different meaning than "He knew he had been right":
- "He knew he was right." - The action of being "right" doesn't stop before the action of "knowing". Being "right", in this case, is a continuous action.
- "He KNEW he had been right when he answered the question on the exam, so he was surprised when he saw an "F" on the graded exam." When did the action of "knowing" happen? At some point in the past (the moment he saw that "F" on his exam). When did the action of "being right" happen? At a DISTINCT time in the past (well before the exam was graded). This construction stresses the difference in the timing of the two actions.
We don't need to make that distinction in conversation, but there's a difference between what passes in day-to-day speech and what's correct on the GMAT! And remember, that the GMAT isn't about coming up with hard and fast rules to blindly apply to future problems. We have to compare the five choices and "select the answer that produces the
most effective sentence."
Here we have to choose between "had accelerated" and "accelerated". The use of the past perfect ("had accelerated") makes the chronology crystal clear: the acceleration happened in the past (after the slowing), and the announcement happened at a later point in the past. That makes perfect (no pun intended) sense!
The use of the simple past ("accelerated') is less clear and allows for an interpretation that doesn't make any sense (that the acceleration started at the same time as the announcement).
Does this mean we can carve some rules in stone when it comes to the past perfect and apply those rules to every other sentence we see? Absolutely not. But among the five choices on THIS question, (A) is the best.
I know we've been talking back and forth about this, but I've just found a sentence and I can't help myself asking what you think.
"At the end of 2001, motion picture industry representatives said that there were about a million copies of Hollywood movies available online, and that they expected piracy to increase as high-speed Internet connections became more widely available"
First of all, since they "said", then shouldn't the content of what they said be in past perfect tense? Second, when they expected, shouldn't they expect something to happen in the future?
(would become rather than became). Thanks!
27 Jan 2020, 16:30
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