Had the diplomatic delegation arrived an hour earlier, the bilateral ceasefire agreement ______ signed without delay.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. would have been
- Step 1: This sentence is an inverted third conditional ('Had... arrived') expressing an unreal counterfactual condition in the past. The corresponding main clause requires the perfect conditional passive form: 'would have been + past participle'. Answer: would have been. Why not the others: "will have been" uses future perfect indicative which is ungrammatical in counterfactual past result clauses; "would be being" uses present conditional progressive, which cannot refer to completed past resolution; "had been fully" uses past perfect indicative, which belongs in conditional clauses rather than main result clauses.
Practise more Subjunctive, Inversion and Cleft Structures.
Free questions with an explanation for every one, and full timed State Certificate of Language Proficiency (KPG) English mock tests.
More Subjunctive, Inversion and Cleft Structures questions
- Hardly ______ the conference hall when the keynote speaker was introduced.
- If the government ______ stricter emissions regulations five years ago, the urban smog levels would not be so severe today.
- The university committee recommended that every faculty member ______ the safety protocol immediately.
- Little ______ about the sudden collapse of the financial institution until the audit was published.
- ______ exhaustively on the clinical trial, the researchers submitted their groundbreaking paper to the medical journal.
- It was not until the early hours of dawn ______ the search team located the missing hikers.