Like former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “who” studied chemistry in college, German chancellor Angela Merkel “was initially” “drawn to” the sciences, “earning” a doctorate in physics before entering politics.
Why isn’t earning wrong?
I thought it would be corrected to “having earned” to express that she got the degree before the politics.
Like saying “We had waited for an hour before she arrived”.
so confused -_-
I mean I’m not super strong in grammar so I can’t give you a definite answer, but my guess would be that it doesn’t fit parallelism. If not, then I’m not sure.
The “earning a doctorate” part is not the main bit of the sentence. The core of the sentence is “Angela Merkel was drawn to the sciences.” Everything else is just filler, additional clauses that are NOT independent thoughts.
Does this make sense?
“Angela Merkel was drawn to the sciences, had earned a doctorate.”
Not really, no. You’d need a conjunction to connect these two independent thoughts. “She was drawn to the sciences” and “She had earned a doctorate” are both complete sentences. You can’t smush them together like that.
“having earned” would indicate that she earned the doctorate before she was “drawn to the sciences,” which of course makes no sense.
Misread, would edit if I could.
Ah I see now.
Thanks guys!