Every Monday, my non-native English speaking friends and I meet and learn English from one another in one of our houses. We have learned that "Over/During/In" can be used interchangeably. In our discussion last Monday, we made up an example as shown below. We all agreed that the tense in the first sentence is OK. However, we did not know how to fix the tense in the second sentence.
(ex) Over/During/In the last few weeks, we have been collecting data from people using questionnaires. When we finished our data collection two days ago, we found some misprints in the questions.
The present perfect continuous "have been collecting" suggests that our data collection started at some point in the past and continues until right now. The simple past in the next sentence indicates that our collection ended two days ago. This contradicts with the fact that our collection continues until now.
How can we fix the problem with the tenses? Thank you for your help.
(ex) Over/During/In the last few weeks, we have been collecting data from people using questionnaires. When we finished our data collection two days ago, we found some misprints in the questions.
The present perfect continuous "have been collecting" suggests that our data collection started at some point in the past and continues until right now. The simple past in the next sentence indicates that our collection ended two days ago. This contradicts with the fact that our collection continues until now.
How can we fix the problem with the tenses? Thank you for your help.
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