Some hotel guests would rather the hotel provvides rooms

Question

Some hotel guests  would rather the hotel provvides rooms that donot face the street. 

A)

B) would rather the hotel provide rooms that donot face the street.

C) would rather the hotel provides rooms that did not face the street.

D) would rather the hotel provided rooms that donot face the street.

E) would rather the hotel provide rooms not facing the street.

I would like to understand how this type of TENSE works. Explanations will be GREATLY APPRECIATED. 

Especially pls let me know if there is any place i can study the hardcore tenses like "should be" "would be" "could be" etc.


Highlight for OA:  D

maaverick · Answer

I'll pick (C)

The usage of "would rather.." is similar to that of "prefer to.."

For example, if you said: "I would prefer my friend attending XBS to YBS." would translate to "I would  rather  my friend  attended XBS "

Here, the guests are not trying to decided whether the hotel would give them room at all. The fact that they would be provided with rooms, but they would prefer not to have rooms facing the street. This fact would look like 

"Some hotel guests would  prefer  the hotel provide them rooms away from the street  to  rooms facing the streets"

and would translate to choice  (C)  in the "would rather.." term

HongHu · Answer

Ahh thanks maaverick for the explantion. According to your example, the answer would be (D).

Folaa3 · Answer

I am caught between (B) and (D). 

(D) uses provided however i am not sure if this tense is correct.

maaverick · Answer

The stem says that some hotel guests would prefer rooms which do not face the street. The preference here is between the rooms which face the street and rooms which dont. Therefore, the bare-bone paraphrasing of this argument would be: some guests would  prefer  (to stay in) rooms which do not face the street  to  the rooms which face the street.

Option (D) convey the preference is between the hotel providing them rooms and the hotel not providing them rooms. "Some guests would prefer the hotel  provide  them rooms (facing the street or facing the beach or the lake)  to  not provide them rooms at all. The preference being conveyed here takes away the focus from the kind of rooms the guests prefer. 

Just my thoughts. I may be wrong here, but it would be great if anyone could post either the OE or their arguments.

Editing post because I'd mistakenly thought someone had posted the OA.

Folaa3 · Answer

OA is (D)

HongHu · Answer

So we could assume that this usage is almost always in past tense then. (Subjunctive mood I suppose?)

HongHu · Answer

I'd just memory this one: I'd rather prefer he did something. (which he didn't do really, so it is subjunctive)

greenandwise · Answer

If it were D shouldn't it be:

Some hotels guests would rather the hotel provided rooms that  did  not face the street.

I would have gone with B.

HongHu · Answer

Maybe because the rooms are always facing the street, so it is a fact, like this one:

He talked about why the earth goes around the sun.

Just a thought.

vprabhala · Answer

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Some hotel guests would rather the hotel provvides rooms

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