GMATPREP question need help

[thanghnvn]

Less than 35 years after the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, their descendants, popularly known as killer bees, had migrated as far north as southern Texas.

A) Less than 35 years after the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

B) In less than 35 years since releasing African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

C) In less than the 35 years since African honeybees had been released outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

D) It took less than 35 years from the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, when

E) It took less than the 35 years after the time that African honeybees were released outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, and then

Thank you Manhantan experts.
1. had done
on gmat, "had done" alway needs a past action or past point of time which precedes and is in sequence with the action of "had done" . We can not use "had done" alone. Is this right?

2. releasing
"releasing" in B suggests that "descendents" do "releasing. Why do you think so, Ron, pls explain.

is the reason that "doing" is used when the subject/creator of "doing" appears clear from the context of the sentence.
in contrast, noun of "do" (such as "attempt), is used then we refer to general action.

when we do possessive+noun (such as "my attempt") ? if we have 2 following choices, what is better?
in trying to take gmat, I get many new things
in my attempt to take gmat, I get many new things.
we can not use
in attempt to take gmat, I get many new thing

one proplem arises when the "do" has no noun. for example, "learn" has no "learnation". we only have "learn" and "learning". The problem is that I want to refer to a general action but I have no noun. what I will use "doing" or " doing of" ? dose "doing" is use when the creator of "doing" is clear and "doing of" is use when general action is refered to . for example,

3 years after opening of Havard school, He had finished his gmat course
3 years after opening Havard school, He had finished his gmat course

are the two sentences different? In the first, "he" dose not "open". IN the second, "he" " open" .

are those things correct?
pls, help.

[RonPurewal]

1. had done
on gmat, "had done" alway needs a past action or past point of time which precedes and is in sequence with the action of "had done" . We can not use "had done" alone. Is this right?

this is backward; "had VERBed" must precede, and/or continue up to, the specified past point in time.

2. releasing
"releasing" in B suggests that "descendents" do "releasing. Why do you think so, Ron, pls explain.

is the reason that "doing" is used when the subject/creator of "doing" appears clear from the context of the sentence.
in contrast, noun of "do" (such as "attempt), is used then we refer to general action.

this sounds accurate.

when we do possessive+noun (such as "my attempt") ? if we have 2 following choices, what is better?
in trying to take gmat, I get many new things
in my attempt to take gmat, I get many new things.

these are basically identical, except in that the singular "attempt" implies that you've only made one attempt. "trying", on the other hand, is indeterminate, and could signify one attempt, or 1 million attempts, or however many.

we can not use
in attempt to take gmat, I get many new thing

well, there are lots of things wrong with this sentence. in fact, so many things are wrong in this sentence that it's not clear to me exactly what problem you're trying to illustrate.

one proplem arises when the "do" has no noun. for example, "learn" has no "learnation". we only have "learn" and "learning". The problem is that I want to refer to a general action but I have no noun. what I will use "doing" or " doing of" ? dose "doing" is use when the creator of "doing" is clear and "doing of" is use when general action is refered to . for example,

3 years after opening of Havard school, He had finished his gmat course
3 years after opening Havard school, He had finished his gmat course

are the two sentences different? In the first, "he" dose not "open". IN the second, "he" " open" .

thanghnvn, before i answer this question, here's the most important thing i can point out: i don't think you put enough effort into observing the language and familiarizing yourself with it. instead, it appears that you're ignoring the actual appearance of the language, as written by people who know how to write it, and concentrating exclusively on "rules".

for instance, after all the posting you've done here, you are still spelling "does" incorrectly, and (in other posts) still using "logic", a noun, instead of the adjective "logical".
these are very easy things to observe and fix; the fact that you are still doing them incorrectly, after hundreds of posts, seems to indicate that you aren't trying to achieve familiarity with the language.
that's the most important thing you can have. it's not possible to approach this as a set of "rules"; you have to develop the requisite intuition, too.

in any case, yes, the first is incorrect, unless the person in question actually opened harvard by him- or herself.

it's hard to judge the second, because i can't think of any reasonable meaning that could be assigned to it.
(what does harvard have to do with gmat courses? how is the timing of an individual's gmat studies related to the opening of a university?)
since there is no definite meaning, it's impossible to say whether that example is "correct".

[benjamindian]

Team,
Please help me on this question, as i am very confused.

What is their descendants in A -
Less than 35 years after the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil
I guess, "their" is referring to "African honeybees" i.e subject but how can "their" refer to anything following "of" ? I was under the impression that the subject of a clause cannot be in of ....

Please help me !

this has nothing to do with the "subject of a clause"; we're discussing the antecedent of a pronoun, not the subject of a clause.

the pronoun is UNAMBIGUOUS - "african honeybees" is the only possible thing to which "their" can refer - so we're all good here.

could you pls elaborate more, Ron?
i'm still confused
in OG-12-43 C: that is about the same size as Great Britain’s land area, but in Laos with a population of only 4 million people, many of them
OG says"The reference of them is unclear"
and here's the link if anyone is interested:

so i assume that in this question, A got the same problem since a pronoun cannot refer to a noun after "of"

also, in OG, "Beatrix Potter, in her book illustrations, carefully coordinated them..."
them cannot refer to illustrations because of the preposition in

one more example,OG 12"In a previous design, the weight of the discus used in Track competition is concentrated in a metal center,but now it is lined with lead around the perimeter,"
it cannot refer to the discus

and i conclude that pronoun cannot refer to a noun in the prepositional phrase, and i've been using this rule for quite a long time, is that wrong?

thanks in advance!

Can someone comment on the rule mentioned above "pronoun cannot refer to a noun in the prepositional phrase"?

[RonPurewal]

I can't tell you 100%.

If a modifier is enclosed within commas, though, the point is that it's grammatically "disposable".

So, if you had a sentence with a pronoun in the main part"”but its referent in one of these modifiers"”then, yes, that seems problematic.

Even if this is indeed a rule, though, I can't imagine that it would ever be helpful on the exam.
To be honest, it seems to have very little potential to do anything but distract the test taker from more fundamental things.

[lindaliu9273]

Hi Ron,

Your explanation is always awsome!

Can we elimiate B/C by "since". I think in many cases, since expects present perfect tense. But I'm not sure about whether since can be with past perfect.

#1 since + present time, have done
#2 since + past time/action, had done>>>correct?

Thank you!

[RonPurewal]

Hi Ron,

Your explanation is always awsome!

Can we elimiate B/C by "since". I think in many cases, since expects present perfect tense. But I'm not sure about whether since can be with past perfect.

#1 since + present time, have done
#2 since + past time/action, had done>>>correct?

Thank you!

#2 is fine, if there is enough context.

Yesterday I ate pork and beans, a dish I hadn't eaten for over twenty years.

(If I were sitting at the table, I'd say "I haven't eaten this dish in over twenty years.")

[FanPurewal]

Less than 35 years after the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, their descendants, popularly known as killer bees, had migrated as far north as southern Texas.

A) Less than 35 years after the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

B) In less than 35 years since releasing African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

C) In less than the 35 years since African honeybees had been released outside Sao Paulo, Brazil,

D) It took less than 35 years from the release of African honeybees outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, when

E) It took less than the 35 years after the time that African honeybees were released outside Sao Paulo, Brazil, and then

hi there
i guess *it* is wrong in D, because of this reason (please click here:http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/post49622.html#p49622)

the usage of *it* is not one of the three mentioned by Ron, so i think we can eliminate D for this reason.

can someone confirm?
thank you in advance!

[RonPurewal]

correct; "it took ... when ..." is not a thing.

the following structure does, in fact, exist in informal usage:
It took [time period] for [person/thing] to [verb]
e.g., "it takes birds over a week to fly south for the winter."

on the other hand, you're not going to encounter such a structure in a correct answer, since it can always be transformed into a more compact structure with [person/thing] as the subject.
the above example, for instance, can be transformed into "birds take over a week to fly south for the winter".

[NicoleT643]

Hi Ron, your explanation in the threat is amazing, thanks. I have one question
About the timeframe, you mentioned in the sentence, the past perfect tense "had migrated" needs another time indicator, in choice A the indicator is less than 35 years after the release.

My question is, does the action "had migrated" finish at a certain point after the release but before now?

Another Gmat question is : In 1981 children in the United States spent an average of slightly less than two and a half hours a week doing household chores; chores; by 1997 that figure had grown to nearly six hours a week". In this sentence "had grown" happened before 1997.

Thanks.

[RonPurewal]

does the action "had migrated" finish at a certain point after the release but before now?

^^ yes; that's the point 35 years after the bees were released.

please search the forum for an existing thread about the other problem. thanks.

[AdityaA237]

Cant we say directly that since an adverbial phrase cannot have a verb, "A" is correct

this is a tricky one.

if you were narrating in the present tense, you'd say the following: 'as of today, the bees have migrated as far north as southern texas.' therefore, since this sentence describes a situation in the past (it describes the situation 35 years after the release, which is before the present), you translate all present-tense verbs into the past tense. this turns 'have migrated' into 'had migrated'.

there is no explicit description of the 'second event' you're looking for in this problem, which is what makes it difficult. instead, the 'second event' is the point on the timeline, 35 years after the release of the bees. because the sentence describes a trend whose relevance continues up to and through that point, a perfect tense is appropriate.

wrong answers:
* choice b implies that the honeybees' descendants somehow released them (perhaps a very bizarre case of karmic cycles, but absurd no matter what).
* choice c: 'the 35 years since' implies that the present is 35 years after the release date. not only does this conflict with the meaning of the original, but it also renders the past perfect (from the underlined part) inappropriate: you'd need present perfect in this case. also, since the release is a point event, it would belong in the simple past.
* choice d: in this sentence, the commas + non-essential modifier ('..., when') seem to imply that the descendants' migration took place simultaneously with the release of the original honeybees. in addition, in this sentence, 'it' refers to some unspecified event (it can't refer to the descendants' migration, for the aforementioned reasons).
* choice e: all kinds of problems with this one. if you don't see what's wrong with it, reply and we will elaborate.

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

To be clear, A is the correct answer. Which adverbial phrase are you referring to?

[WANLIH774]

[quote="RonPurewal"]

you only use "fewer than" with what are called countable items.
strictly speaking, this means things that:
1) ONLY exist in whole number quantities (i.e., you can't have, say, 5.5 of them), and
2) are actually separable from each other.

Hi All,
Ron mentioned that we should use "fewer" for "whole number quantities", and I think the same rule with "many", is it?
However, question OG2020-794 used "many" modifies "hours". I think we can express as 3.5 hours, which is not whole number quantities. I also understand usually we say that "how many hours do you have?", instead of "how much hours do you have?"
So how do I understand the rule to the use of "hours"? Thanks!

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

The distinction between countable nouns (such as "apples") and uncountable nouns (such as "air") gets more complicated in a few cases. Time is one of them. Sure, of course you'd say 'How many hours did you spend?' (this is more or less the same question as 'How much time did you spend?'), even though we could also answer '5.5 hours'. The point about hours is that we sometimes talk about them as individual, countable entities, but at other times we talk about them in the same way that we talk about time, i.e. as a smooth spectrum. See if you can work out if the following sentences are correct or incorrect:

I slept less than 6 hours last night.
Last month I worked 5 hours of overtime, but this month it will be 2 hours less.
The amount of hours that we spent on this project is incredible.
How much do you sleep at night?
Stacey ran a marathon in fewer than 4 hours.

[WANLIH774]

Thanks so much! My answers:
I slept less than 6 hours last night.---incorrect, should be "fewer"
Last month I worked 5 hours of overtime, but this month it will be 2 hours less.---incorrect, should be "fewer"
The amount of hours that we spent on this project is incredible. ---incorrect, should be "number"
How much do you sleep at night? ---correct.
Stacey ran a marathon in fewer than 4 hours. ---incorrect, should be "less"

Actually, I'm not quite sure, especially the top three sentences. Please correct me. I'm confused about the use of "hours" as a countable noun.
Thanks a lot!