Question: The company announced that its profits declined much less in the second quarter than analysts had expected it to and its business will improve in the second half of the year.
(A) had expected it to and its business will improve
(B) had expected and that its business would improve
(C) expected it would and that it will improve its business
(D) expected them to and its business would improve
(E) expected and that it will have improved its business
“The company announced that its profits declined much less in the second quarter”- is a GMAT sentence correction question. This particular GMAT sentence correction topic has been taken from the book ‘GMAT Official Guide Verbal Review 2019’. This question checks Meaning, Tenses, and Grammatical Construction. GMAT Sentence Correction questions comprise 11-16 questions to be completed within 65 minutes. Each Sentence Correction question contains a sentence with an underlined portion that includes 0-2 errors.
Answer: B
Explanation: The following concepts are tested here:
- Meaning
- Tenses
- Grammatical Construction
Option A: Incorrect
When we look at the past perfect tense (“had expected”), then we will also look for other “time marker” that occurs in the more recent past. We have such time markers like: “had expected” profits to decline. Here, the pronoun “it” is definitely wrong. “It” could refer to “company”, which wouldn’t make sense. The company had expected profits to decline, so the correct way to say is “had expected THEM to.” Hence option A is incorrect.
Option B: Correct
In this option, like the previous one, the past perfect “had expected” makes perfect sense. The parallelism works, too: “and” is followed by a subordinate clause, “that its business would improve.”
We get the following “The company announced that its profits declined… and that its business would improve in the second half of the year…”. This seems correct and the word “would” is used since it’s a prediction about the future that’s made in the past. Hence, B is the correct option.
Option C: Incorrect
This option has the same pronoun problem as the first option. The first “it” needs to refer to “profits” in order for the sentence to make sense. Here it does not do so, making it incorrect.
Option D: Incorrect
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.
The parallelism marker is wrong. The word “and” is followed by the clause “its business would improve”. We do not get clear information if “its business would improve” is parallel to “analysts expected them to” or “its profits declined…”. It is confusing since both are parallel.
Option E: Incorrect
In this option, the sentence makes more sense if we use the past perfect “had expected”. It also makes more sense if we say that “business would improve”. This suggests revenue increase instead of “it will have improved its business” which means that the company will make changes to make the business better. Hence, it is not correct.
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