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I run into a question as shown below studying an exam held in my country:
Fill the blank.
The passengers ---- the announcement of the cancelled flight for the second time groaned audibly.A) heard
B) to hear
C) to be hearing
D) to have heard
E) having heard
The answer is E option. But I didn't get why the answer is not B or D. What is the difference in meaning?
The passengers ---- the announcement of the cancelled flight for the second time groaned audibly.
A) heard
B) to hear
C) to be hearing
D) to have heard
E) having heard
The way I usually check it:
We have a part that says what the passengers did - "groaned audibly" and the explanation of why they did so.
So what I usually do is reconstruct the sentence as follows:
In this case once I do a check of all the possible options I can see that only one option is possible and it is E.
"A" can't work since we get two consecutive verbs "Passengers heard it groaned".
"B" is grammatically correct but makes no sense "Passengers to hear it groaned".
"C" is plain incorrect "Passengers to be hearing it groaned"
"D" is definitely incorrect too "Passengers to have heard it groaned". I've never encountered such a usage of the infinitive clause.
