Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[chinagary]

Dear Sir or Madam,
I don't quite understand the structure and meaning of the following sentence: "Having never given wild chimpanzees more than a passing thought in my life before, it now became absolutely essential that I should see one."

Thanks
Gary

[Jintii]

It means:

I never thought more than a second or two about chimpanzees before. But now, I really have to see one.

[CP]

The sentence is a little hard to parse because the phrase beginning with "having" appears to be attached to "it" when it belongs to "I," and some other words are misplaced or unnecessary.

Rearranging terms a bit, the sentence reads:

"Never before having given wild chimpanzees more than a passing thought, I now felt it was absolutely essential that I should see one."

This means, "Even though I had never thought much about wild chimps before, I suddenly felt that I just had to see one."
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