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Good Q! Below is what I got from a Manhattan GMAT staff http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/gains-in-stock-market-had-t10316.html
note that the past perfect can be used, roughly speaking, in two different circumstances: 1) for past actions that were ongoing until, or relevant to, a later past action (this is what you're thinking about); OR 2) for past actions that were ongoing until, or relevant to, a later past TIME MARKER.
for #2, the second time marker could be something explicitly mentioned in the sentence. before the introduction of soft landing mats, high jumpers had been forced to use the western-roll style of jumping --> note that there is no second verb, but "the introduction of soft landing mats" is a time marker.
however, if the context of the sentence clearly IMPLIES a second time marker, then that second time marker may not even have to be mentioned explicitly. in this sentence, the second time marker is implied by the phrase "earlier in the year" -- i.e., these fears were ongoing until a certain point that is already in the past.
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as a final note, make sure you know that the difficulty of learning verb tenses -- not just in english but in any language -- is going to be vastly higher than the difficulty of learning almost anything else in a language. verb tenses tend to encode extremely subtle information, and, worse, their usages vary wildly from language to language -- it's rare to find any two languages that have tenses exactly equivalent to one another. (even in european languages that are closely related to english, different tenses are often used for the same situation than would be used in english.) |
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