Tense?

Question

If you were asked to one hundred Americans living in Japan what they appreciate/appreciated most about Japan, they would probably say, “the high degree of law and order.”

Which tense would you use?

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

teacherJapan
If you ~~were~~ asked to one hundred Americans living in Japan what they appreciate/appreciated most about Japan, they would probably say, “the high degree of law and order.”
Which tense would you use?

Actually, I'm indifferent to the choice there. Either will do. I'd probably end up with "appreciate", but for no particular reason except possibly because the people are living in Japan (in the present), so they would be also be appreciating things in Japan (in the present). That's the semantic argument.

The syntactic argument (for "appreciated") is that the past tense matches "were" and "would" in the rest of the sentence.

By the way, your choices in the if-clause are these:

If you asked them ... (most usual)
If you were to ask them ...

And (too formal for use in conversation):

Were you to ask them ...

CJ

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