"Why does E-Commerce become prosperous?"

Sentence is a wrong'un, right?

Originally I thought it was a co-location error--somehow. Then I thought, no, it's a pooched present perfect. The writer (of the text book in which this question is posed) wanted, in his heart of hearts, to in fact ask:

"Why has E-Commerce become prosperous?"

But he used do as his auxiliary.

And we all know it can't be used that way because... ?

I'd also want to cite the sentence for the near-Chinglish of "prosperous". It's not a bad adjective, but it's a go-to word that flags the presence of that mysterious Chinese desire for peace, security and... prosperity. It's an omen word more than a description.

"Why has E-Commerce become the semi-viable commercial option we know today?"

Besides prosperous being kind of Chinglishy even when used correctly, I also think that prosperous is better used to descibe people, or specific places, but not concepts.

You could say a "he's prosperous e-merchant" or "he owns a prosperous Taobao shop," but calling saying "e-commerce" is "prosperous" seems off. Maybe because it isn't really accurate? All of e-commerce is certainly not prosperous. You could say it is a source of prosperity if you wanted to. There are word choice issues here.

As for the grammar, you're right. I suppose you could use "does" in certain instances, but "has" is what this guy was looking for. "Does" you would use for some sort of general question, like "why does water become ice?" vs. "why has my cup of water become ice?" or "why does the food at the cafeteria suck so much?" versus "why has the food at the cafeteria sucked recently?" In your example e-commerce becoming prosperous isn't some hypothetical, it is an actual situation that has happened and is presumably still happening. Or something of that sort.

Besides prosperous being kind of Chinglishy even when used correctly, I also think that prosperous is better used to descibe people, or specific places, but not concepts.

Yeah, I was thinking similar too. But it raised the question of what e-commerce is and made my head hurt. Is e-commerce a concept, a developing practice, or is it identical to the new and emerging market place it is constituted by? It is, after all, identified as "e-" and not just as commerce, though perhaps only because it includes novel methods. Nonetheless, if Chinese writers want to pretend it can be discussed under the rubric of their own weird version of markets and business philosophy, can they be stopped?


AAAAIIIIEE!!!
 

Sentence is a wrong'un, right?

Definitely. The use of "prosperous" is a problem, as others have said, but so is the verb tense.

Originally I thought it was a co-location error--somehow. Then I thought, no, it's a pooched present perfect. The writer (of the text book in which this question is posed) wanted, in his heart of hearts, to in fact ask:

"Why has E-Commerce become prosperous?"

Yes, that is almost certainly what he should have written, and what I'd change it to if I were editing. However, note that other possibilities are also correct, each with somewhat different meaning.

Why is E-commerce becoming prosperous?

Why will ...? Why might ...? Why must ...? Why should ...?

Context:

In a two-page essay entitled "What is E-commerce" (no question mark), the first paragraph concludes thus:

With the wide use of computer, the maturity and wide adoption of Internet, the permeation of credit cards, the establishment of secure transaction agreement and the support and promotion by governments, the development of E-Commerce is becoming prosperous, with people starting to use electronic means as the media of doing business.

Later (along with a complete rendering of the essay in Chinese), there are assorted sets of exercises, the last one being a collection of questions, the first question of that collection being "Why does E-Commerce become prosperous?"

The purported aim of the class is the teaching of commercial English, and in particular the English of E-Commerce. With the textbook being a collection of essays and assorted translation exercises, and some discussion, I'm focusing on the sound system of English and some exploration of terminology. Thus the "What is E-Commerce" class will be on the sound of itemised reasoning (falling intonation on the stress point of the last word of each item, and on the stress point of the last word of the conclusion) as compared to the sound of lists (rising intonation on the stress point of the last word of each listed point and a falling intonation on the stress point of the last word of the last listed item).

I might also have to have a go at this word "prosperous", although I wouldn't know what to teach other than "read more books to get a sense of usage!!!"

Are you allowed to collect the books and burn them?

If one of my undergraduates passed that off on me as his own work, I would give it a 72, maybe a 75. Ambitious, but the author substitutes vapid generalizations for insight and fails to answer his own question. That is of course a hard one, as e-com isn't becoming prosperous, but rather is a means of conducting business, one that is becoming very popular, and thus is a means by which many business persons are getting rich. Clearly, this isn't just a case of a Chinese professor with a weak grasp of English, but also of a doofus who has a remarkably shallow grasp of his subject. Not the first, and definitely not the last "textbook" written by Chinese "professors" whose English is pathetic. Who clearly know jack about linguistics and language teaching. These instant experts are sprouting like weeds. Just yesterday they were snivelling undergrads getting away with ill-wrought band 5 or maybe band 6 essays, now they are experts, tomorrow they will be the leaders. What short entrails these gentlemen have!

I think the word he's looking for is probably "profitable." The sentence kinda sorta works if you make that substitution.

As others have said, people can be prosperous...and so can other specific entities like companies, cities, countries, and so on.

Another native-speaker possibility might be "E-commerce is prospering". In this instance, as in some of the others above, "e-commerce" is a metonym indicating people and organisations engaged in e-commerce. But for some reason I can't quite figure out, change it to "becoming prosperous", and it doesn't sound quite right. Maybe it's to do with the usages of metonymy native-speakers instinctively recognise as precedented.

Metonymy is a nice word. Two more are smart and arse.

One thing that is becoming clearer as classes wear on is how little the students appear to know of e-commerce. But I think that may be okay, sensible even. E-commerce is, after all, everywhere in the whole damn world wildly under-resourced if not at the enterprise level then certainly at the tech level. As a concept, it competes almost not at all in the mind of the shopping public. (Imagine some statistics here, some small percentage of actual sales being e-ed.) Thus, any sentence including "e-commerce" that suggests some stable, well-developed market concept is automatically bogus. And for the students to know this would be for them to be, I dunno, MBA candidates, I guess. But it would have been nice for them to have spotted the grammar problem.

"Why does your mom become angry?"