Ending a contentious
Ending a contentious political stalemate that frightened global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, has finally formed a rare coalition government that united liberals and conservatives—and included a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite ministers—to guide Italy, Europe’s third-largest economy, out of stagnation.
(A) frightened global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, has finally formed a rare coalition government that united liberals and conservatives—and included a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite ministers—to guide Italy, Europe’s
(B) had frightened global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, finally formed a rare coalition government uniting liberals and conservatives—and including a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite minister—to guide Italy, with Europe’s
(C) had been frightening global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, has finally formed a rare coalition government uniting liberals and conservatives—and that include a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite minister —to guide Italy, which has Europe’s
(D) had frightened global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, finally formed a rare coalition government that united liberals and conservatives—and including a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite minister—to guide Italy, which has Europe’s
(E) frightened global business leaders, the new Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, finally formed a rare coalition government to unite liberals and conservatives—and includes a record number of women and Italy’s first nonwhite minister—and to guide Italy, with Europe’s
My ques- How to go about this?
Hi Riya,
Let’s look at the order of events.
- Global business leaders were frightened
- A govt was formed
The 2 events that follow each other can be expressed in the following ways
- Ending a stalemate that frightened (simple past) leaders, Enrico has formed (present perfect) a rare coalition government
- Ending a stalemate that had frightened (past perfect) leaders, Enrico formed (simple past) a rare coalition government
Another point to pay attention to is the parallelism between united and included or uniting and including. Any option that disrupts this needs to be eliminated.
We are left with A and B according to the above reasons for elimination
However, option A goes off because of a meaning issue. We use the present perfect tense in order to indicate that something started in the past and continued till the present moment or something happened in the past and the effect of it is felt in the present moment (this means the action should be very recent past)
In this case, we do not know whether the govt was formed very recently. Hence B is the better answer
Hope this helps!