Learn English – Gets vs. Getting

grammarpresent-tenseverbs

I am looking at the following two sentences:

  1. "I suppose it is made up of some sort of tissue that is getting harder as the animal is getting older."
  2. "I suppose it is made up of some sort of tissue that gets harder as the animal gets older."

As a native speaker, the first one sounds strange to me, but I can't wrap my head around why. I would even feel somewhat better (but not entirely okay) with:

"I suppose it is made up of some sort of tissue that is getting harder as the animal gets older."

Is the first sentence wrong or unnatural, or am I just imagining things? If it is, why? I feel like there is some grammatical rule I am overlooking.

Best Answer

I imagine these two sentences in two different situations.

I and my coworker are conducting an experiment. We are in the middle of our experiment and we can observe what is going on. I tell my coworker the first sentence. We are in the middle of the process and I am telling him/her my observation. So it is only natural for me to say the first sentence and avoid the second sentence as it would mean a general result drawn from an ongoing experiment.

For the second sentence, I finished my experiment. I am writing my results. I use the second sentence. Because this is the result we get from our experiment. "A" gets harder as "A" gets older.