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(1)The students who are good at math helped him solve the problems.

(2)The students who were good at math helped him solve the problems.

Let's say this happened 2 days ago. The students mentioned in the sentence are still good at math, so I think (1) is more accurate. Am I right? And (2) is the narrative tense, used only in story telling, right?

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    Both are fine - but idiomatically, native speakers tend to "backshift" are good to were good to reflect the overall Past Tense context of helped him. Same as we'd usually backshift The students who said they were good at math helped him - but that doesn't mean The students who said they are good at math helped him would be "ungrammatical" - it's just less likely. Dec 21, 2018 at 14:36

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Technically both are correct, but when using this to talk explain to others what happened, saying "The students who were good at math helped him solve the problems." makes it seem like you either fell out of touch with those students, or they're dead.

I would personally always use the first sentence in this situation to avoid that potential confusion, but both are technically correct I believe.

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You are running into the problem of implicatures

Both sentences are fine and a native English listener wouldn't find either to be odd in any way.

The problem you're seeing is that the tense of the attributive verb can imply things like the fact that the students who helped may not be good at math anymore.

If it is important to eliminate the implication, you can insert a clause that does this:

The students who were good at math (and continue to be) helped him solve the problems.

This can get unwieldy, though, so unless an implication is significant and likely to be intuited, it's better to just allow them to sit.

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