Q. 10: Can I rewrite the sentence in this way:
The experiences we have when we were children influence our behaviour when we are adults.

I know it sounds awkward. What interests me is the verb tense in such a sentence. Pls correct it if it is wrong and advise the reason.

Are these sentence correct? If not, why? If yes, why?
Q12: Tobacco companies, shaken by a string of legal setbacks in the US, but retaining strong growth prospects in the developing world, face an uncertain future.

Q14: The consultant is looking for a cafe that has comfortable chairs and provides free internet access.
What is the rule regarding the omission of the 2nd that in such a case?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Q10: We can’t say that we HAVE experiences when we WERE children. There is a problem with verb tense agreement here..

Q12: It looks like you’re asking about the parallelism here. The issue with this one is that both “shaken” and “retaining” are adjectives properly describing the companies, so that part is correct. What is incorrect about the sentence is that there should not be a comma before the “but”. When two things are parallel you should avoid putting a comma between them if at all possible. When three or more things are parallel, you will need commas to separate the items in the list..

Q14: Think of a typical sentence as a single track. When you encounter parallelism, you are effectively splitting the sentence into parallel tracks. It is important to identify where the sentence split into parallel tracks, but depending on where you choose to split the sentence there may be multiple correct ways to write the sentence. In this case, we could split the sentence before the word “that”, which would require a “that” in both parallel tracks. Or we could split the sentence after “that”, allowing the “that” to apply to both parallel tracks. The important thing to keep in mind here is that you must not eliminate an answer choice just because the answer chooses to split into parallel tracks at a different point than you would choose to. As long as the option presented can be parallel under some valid interpretation, it does not violate parallelism..

_________________
Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor

And what about

"The experiences we had as children still influence our behaviour as adults"

The change in tense is logical and it is quite concise

The GMATPrep guide talks about parallelism between adulthood and childhood, i am a little awkward with that

Please Advise

i think this would be incorrect. the "as children" modifies "we", but there is no subject or object pronoun that "as adults" can modify. the more important issue though is it's not worth speculating on this subtle point of grammar unless you've seen it in a GMAT question. you will be better off focusing on actual GMAT questions (or Manhattan GMAT questions) rather than making up examples of your own, because only then will you know that you are dealing with an issue that actually comes up on the GMAT..

_________________
Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor