I am looking at the following two sentences:
- "I suppose it is made up of some sort of tissue that is getting harder as the animal is getting older."
- "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.