The subjuctive or the indicative?

[Ilovepsycho]

If a person wanted to travel across the United States mainland in the early 1950s, s/he _____ any of the super highways, freeways, or turnpikes which cross most states nowadays.
(A) didn't find
(B) will have not found
(C) could not have found
(D) would not have been found

This is a grammar exercise. I went with 'A' because I thought it's not the subjunctive mood, but rather the indicative one. Why did I thought like that? Among the examples, there would be the forms 'would~', 'could~', etc, if it's the subjunctive mood, but there are no examples like this. However, OA was 'C', but I can't accept it. What do you think of this?

[Yuri Yurinov]

"Didn't find" doesn't match. In this case you should use the Future in the Past - "wouldn't find".

Yuri
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[Ilovepsycho]

[Esl_Expert]

Hi Ilovepsycho,

I don't have much problem with choosing A as the answer. In that case, the word "if" would have a meaning similar to "when"/"whenever"/"any time".

I don't really like option C very much, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's wrong. I think I would be happiest with option E:

- wouldn't have found

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“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” ~ Charles Kuralt

[Cerberus™]

B: This sentence is about the actual past (the 1950s), which makes "will not have found" (B) unlikely. Even if you paraphrase it as "it will be so (= it is usually so) that he has not found any ... if he wanted...", it is wrong.

A: In addition, this specific time in the past makes "wanted" less likely to be past subjunctive than past simple; that is why I'd not pick A. Another reason not to pick A is the following. If we put the sentence into the present, we get: "if a person wants to travel ... he does not find any...". That is an uncommon combination: "if a person wants to travel ... he will not find any..." is what one would expect.

D: Transferred to the present we get: "If a person wants to travel ... he will not have found any ...". That is a bit odd, too: there is no reason why the finding would have taken place before the wanting to travel. And yet, I must say that this one sounds most natural to me: "if a person wanted ... he would not have found..." is probably a hypothetical situation in the past. I'd pick this one. I'd paraphrase it as "if a person wanted to travel back then, he would not have found roads if he had searched for any". It appears to be a strange mixture of past and hypothesis; I'd rephrase the entire sentence.

C: "If a person wanted to travel ... he could not have found any...". That doesn't sound very natural to me either; "can/could" implies that he would have actually been searching. I don't understand why they chose C.

Edit: I see now that I misread D entirely... "would not have been found" is of course nonsense.
About A: "didn't find" would be past simple; but I'd say it implies that this person had been actively searching for these roads when he didn't find them. If you do not find something, you have been looking for it. That would only be possible if the searching were hypothetical - but then there would be no past simple.