ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by movie theatres. We know you really want

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to get some Junior Mints, but we're running late, so you might have to make some concessions.

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How would you correct the following sentence, if it needs correcting at all?

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Before we had left for the movie theater, we had eaten dinner.

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The past perfect tense, or the super past tense, is used to compare two events that

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started and ended in the past.

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So we're looking for an answer choice that uses "had" in front of one past participle

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and not the other, to show that one event occurred before the other one.

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(A) isn't correct, because the original sentence goes overboard with the "hads."

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Take it easy, (A). The Buddha says that moderation is the key to non-suffering.

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Choice (B) puts both parts of the sentence in the past tense.

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Since we're looking for one of these to be in the past perfect tense, however, we can

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take it out of the running.

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While the last choice had too many "hads," this one has none at all.

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Well, (C) does have only one "had," but it comes in the wrong place.

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In this sentence, eating dinner comes before leaving for the movie theater, so we need

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the "had" to be connected with "eaten" rather than "left."

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Choice (D) delivers exactly what we were talking about, making it the correct answer.

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When we eat before going to the movies, we always save room for popcorn.

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