Question- If the books have been cataloged last week, why haven’t they been placed on the shelf?
- have been cataloged
- would have been cataloged
- was cataloged
- were cataloged
- had been cataloged
“If the Books have been Cataloged Last Week, Why haven’t They been Placed on the Shelf?” – is a particular GMAT sentence correction topic. This has been taken from the book ‘The Official Guide of GMAT Verbal Review’. This question checks Meaning, Pronouns, Subject-verb agreement, and Idiom. GMAT Sentence Correction questions comprise 11-16 questions to be completed within 65 minutes. Each GMAT Sentence Correction question contains a sentence with an underlined portion that includes 0-2 errors.
Answer: D
Explanation:
In the question, the underlined part has to be replaced by a suitable answer from the given options. The question states -If the books have been cataloged last week, why haven’t they been placed on the shelf?
This sentence contains the subjunctive tense. This tense is usually used to express hypothetical events like the one in the question. The sentence starts with “if the books …” which suggests that the action has yet not happened. So, we can use “were” regardless of the subject.
The action that has not occurred is in the present perfect. Since this is a single action that should have been a pre-requisite. It stands to reason that it would be in the past tense. In general, we should look to figure out the tense of a verb based on its relationship to the other actions in the sentence.
Note: Candidates might get confused and opt for option E. Option E suggests that the event is in the past tense. So, it is not the correct answer.
Therefore, using option D ‘were cataloged’ refers to the outcome action in the present tense. Hence D is the correct answer.
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