within/after

[diamondcutter]

One day, I was reading my favorite magazine. My little girl was playing around me, which made my reading impossible. To get some peace, I tried a trick to keep her busy for a little while. I took a page out from my magazine with a printed map on it. I cut the map into pieces and handed them over to her, asking her to put those pieces together and make a complete map again.
But within several minutes, she was standing in front of me with a perfect map in her little hands.

Source: English test paper, Henan Province Senior High School Entrance Examinations, 2020

In the last sentence above, I’d like to know if the use of the preposition “within” is correct and whether it should be replaced with “after” or “in”.

 

[emsr2d2]

"Within" is correct. It means "in less than".

There are a couple of unnatural phrases in that piece, though.

I'd use "which made reading impossible" (no "my").
I'd use "I tore a page out of my magazine ...".
I'd use "and handed them to her."
I'd use "... to put the pieces [back] together."
I'd use "... within just a few minutes."

 

[Tdol]

You could also use inside several minutes- it shows how fast she was.

 

[diamondcutter]

I cut the map into pieces and handed them over to her.

Hi, Emsr2d2.
Could you tell me why the adverb "over" in this sentence is not necessary? Is it because the distance between the father and the girl is very short?

 

[emsr2d2]

No, it's nothing to do with distance. We simply hand something to someone. You can't hand something to someone if they're a long way away! The distance has to be short enough for the item in question to simply be passed from one person's hand to the other person's hand. If the distance is more than that, we wouldn't use "hand".

 

[diamondcutter]

We can say "go over to someone" if there's some distance between the two people but we don't say "hand something over to someone" because if you can hand something to someone, you are close to each other. Is my understanding correct?

 

[emsr2d2]

I didn't say that we don't say "hand something over to someone". We do. We say it a lot. It's simply that it's not necessary. It adds nothing to the sentence.