Up to now, the predicted Millennium computer bug . . . . . . . . very few problems, although many scientists last year . . . . . . . . a catastrophe.

has been causing/have predicted
is causing/predict
causes/were predicting
caused/have been predicting E. has caused/predicted

The correct answer is: E. has caused/predicted

The Millennium computer bug was a computer glitch that was predicted to occur at the turn of the millennium, on January 1, 2000. The bug was caused by the way that computers stored dates. In the early days of computing, memory was very limited, so dates were stored using two digits instead of four. This meant that the year 2000 was stored as 00, which could be interpreted as 1900 by some computer systems. This could have caused problems with date-sensitive data, such as bank records and flight schedules.

However, despite the predictions of many scientists, the Millennium computer bug did not cause any major problems. This was due to a combination of factors, including the efforts of computer programmers to fix the bug, and the fact that many computer systems were not actually affected by it.

The sentence “Up to now, the predicted Millennium computer bug has caused very few problems, although many scientists last year predicted a catastrophe” is in the past perfect tense. This tense is used to talk about events that happened before a specific point in time in the past. In this case, the specific point in time is “now”. The sentence is saying that the Millennium computer bug had caused very few problems up to the point in time when the sentence was written.

The first option, “has been causing/have predicted”, is incorrect because the past perfect tense is not used to talk about events that are still happening. The second option, “is causing/predict”, is incorrect because the past perfect tense is not used to talk about events that are happening at the same time. The third option, “causes/were predicting”, is incorrect because the past perfect tense is not used to talk about events that happened before a specific point in time in the past. The fourth option, “caused/have been predicting”, is incorrect because the past perfect tense is not used to talk about events that are still happening. The fifth option, “has caused/predicted”, is correct because the past perfect tense is used to talk about events that happened before a specific point in time in the past.

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