Which of the following sentences uses the past perfect verb tense?

A. By June, I will have owned the camera shop for a decade.
B. After it was sold, I had owned the camera shop for 12 years.
C. I cannot recall a time when I have not owned some kind of shop.
D. I owned that shop in the year you were born.

Please help I do not understand this. I do not think the answer is D but I'm not sure. Please help!

The "perfect" tenses in English are identifiable by their auxiliary verbs:

perfect -- has/have (She has gone to the grocery.)
past perfect -- had (They had gone on their trip before she got home.)
future perfect -- will have (She will have finished her homework by the time I get home.)

Let me know what you think.

I think the answer is B - After it was sold, I had owned the camera shop for 12 years.

Yes. B is correct.

To determine which of the given sentences uses the past perfect verb tense, we need to understand what the past perfect tense is and how it is formed.

The past perfect tense is used to describe an action that was completed before another action in the past. It is formed by using the auxiliary verb "had" followed by the past participle of the main verb.

Let's analyze each sentence to find the one that matches this pattern:

A. By June, I will have owned the camera shop for a decade.
- This sentence uses the future perfect tense ("will have owned"), not the past perfect tense.

B. After it was sold, I had owned the camera shop for 12 years.
- This sentence uses the past perfect tense ("had owned"). It describes owning the camera shop for 12 years after it was sold, indicating that the action of owning the shop happened before the event of it being sold.

C. I cannot recall a time when I have not owned some kind of shop.
- This sentence uses the present perfect tense ("have not owned"), not the past perfect tense.

D. I owned that shop in the year you were born.
- This sentence uses the simple past tense ("owned"), not the past perfect tense.

Therefore, the sentence that uses the past perfect verb tense is B. "After it was sold, I had owned the camera shop for 12 years."