<p>one quick question before the OCT SAT!</p>
<p>Quincy took Dan to Derek's home (for a visit), (never imagining) that five years (would pass) before (seeing) Derek Again.</p>
<p>Could you please explain this? thanks man</p>
<p>shouldnt it be “before he would see Derek again”?</p>
<p>i think it might be ambiguous pronoun usage… (never imagining) who does that refer too??</p>
<p>So I am going with B.</p>
<p>It is not B. B clearly has an antecedent. It’s “quincy” because she is the subject of the sentence. It cannot be D b/c the person who did the “seeing” is unknown. Was it the word “pass” that did the “Seeing”?</p>
<p>It’s D
should be ‘getting/having a chance to see’ or something like that insetad of simple ‘seeing’</p>
<p>^No. Your answer is correct but your explanation is not. “getting/having a chance to see” is much wordier than simple “seeing.” Be concise as possible.</p>
<p>5 years will pass before I see you again</p>
<p>idk… that sentence sounds correct. darn!</p>
<p>before he saw</p>
<p>Imagining is a participle (which usually ends with -ing) that represents an action that occurs as something else is going on. Therefore, it must match the main action (the taking of Dan to Derek’s home). Both actions are done by the same person, Quincy, presumably (at roughly the same time), so there is no grammatical ambiguity in “never imagining.”</p>
<p>Seeing is a gerund that refers to the action of seeing. By simply using “seeing,” the sentence does not tell you who is doing the action. Also, the tenses should be consistent between “five years would pass” and “seeing.” Hence, “seeing” should be “he would see,” because it includes a subject and makes the tense consistent.</p>
<p>“Five years would pass before he would see Derek again.”</p>
<p>“Would” in this case is the past tense of “will.” In present tense, you would say, “Five years will pass before I will see him again.” After you see him, looking back on the event, you would say, “Five years would pass before I would see him again.” Since “will” means “is/are going to,” try substituting “WAS/WERE going to” for “would” since it is in the past tense: “Five years were going to pass before I was going to see him again.”</p>
<p>The original sentence’s “seeing” refers only to an action, so you should understand why it is wrong. Who is doing the action? What is the tense of the action? (Neither question can be answered. It is a gerund and a noun, so it has no tense. For example, in the clause “smoking is bad,” “smoking” is merely an action. It does not refer to any present instance of smoking. Only the present participle, which looks identical in form to the gerund, can have tense: “I am smoking.”)</p>
<p>I think it should be “before he saw,” rather than “before he would see,” because the action described is a discrete one, rather than an ongoing one.</p>
<p>
“Would see” is just as “discrete” as “saw” is. Both are in the simple past tense. Since the sentence is talking about the passing of five years, there is an anticipation that warrants “would.” We aren’t merely looking from the present into the past and saying, “He saw him.” We are saying, “He would see him after five years.”</p>
<p>Now I don’t know if technically “saw” is incorrect in this context, but I don’t view it as better than or equal to “would see.”</p>