(Until being widely hunted for its) ivory and blubber in the eighteenth century, walruses were plentiful in the waters of the northeaster United States.
A. Until being widely hunted for its
B. Before having been widely hunted for its
C. Up to them being widely hunted for their
D. Until they were widely hunted for their
E. Before they have been widely hunted for their
I get that the answer is D, but can anyone explain why the rest is not right?
I particularly don’t understand why B and E is wrong, although it sounds wrong. What’s the difference between having been and have been, and what is the difference between had been and have been?
If you use before, the “idiom” is BEFORE BEING. That is:
Before being widely hunted for their ivory and blubber in the eighteenth century, walruses were plentiful in the waters of the northeaster United States.
Apart from that, choice B says “its”, but it should be their.
Possessive pronoun must be “their”. Therefore, D is the only one with their that works.
(B) is wrong because the pronoun “its” is singular and the antecedent “walruses” is plural.
(E) is a tense error–you have the superpast “had” construction in the second part of the sentence, so the previous event must be simple past (“were”). It has other problems, but this one is the most glaring.
There are a lot of tense errors in most choices but D, which uses parallel simple past. in both clauses, correctly Lots of complicated things like present perfect i(E) after “Before,” which is wrong in itself and which you can’t use with the simple past after it.
You can definitely use simple past after the word “before,” @epiphany – “Before the game began, the teams hadn’t expected rain” or “Before I learned vocab I couldn’t solve sentence completion questions.”
Am I misunderstanding you?
I think you are, @marvin100
I said you couldn’t use the present perfect before “Before,” when that clause precedes the simple past. (The time sequence is incorrect.) ;
Present perfect tends to be paired with the simple present, such as
“Since they have been widely hunted for their ivory…walruses [mow] are no longer plentiful…”
Both clauses imply both situations ongoing. Of course, that’s not the meaning intended to be conveyed in this case because they are no longer (legally) hunted, and thus probably not hunted “widely” in the present.
Okay, @Epiphany93 , that makes more sense (assuming you mean “precedes in time” rather than in syntactic sequence).