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One of my friends while writing a passage wrote the following sentence that contained both present progressive and present simple tense within a single sentence:

Road accidents are happening because people do not follow traffic rules. [Present progressive to present simple]

This very sentence was checked by an English tutor who didn't find anything wrong in it. I immediately thought that the above quoted sentence must be:

Road accidents happen because people do not follow traffic rules. [Both present simple]

I suppose while watching the news, we can say 'road accidents are happening across different parts of the country because people do not follow traffic rules'. Because incidents are happening currently, not from so long.

Overall, my question is that is it natural for a native speaker to shift from one progressive to simple within single sentence?

If we talk about tense shift , it is according thoughtco.com:

In English grammar, tense shift refers to the change from one verb tense to another (usually from past to present, or vice versa) within a sentence or paragraph.

This tells that we can change from past to present or vice versa; however that has not specified what I want here. My question is actually confided to one tense only, which is present. To further clarify my question, which of the following is more grammatical or idiomatic?

A. Road accidents are happening because people do not follow traffic rules.

B. Road accidents happen because people do not follow traffic rules.

I also didn't find any helpful results by googling this.

Or what do you say, if I substitute 'since' in place of 'because'? Such as:

C. Road accidents happen since people do not follow traffic rules.

This question was asked in my job test, and I was confused in selecting options; as I suspect that the question itself is fallible with wrong options, see Q. No. 15:

question paper image

Ahmed
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  • To say that things happen does not imply anything about their happening "at the same time", "regularly", or "one after the other". Your use of "since" for "because" is confusing because "since" might be read as "at a time after". Please clarify your question by removing such confusing aspects.. – Anton Jan 29 '23 at 13:25
  • I was born and will die. There's a normal sentence with no conflict for different tenses. – Yosef Baskin Jan 29 '23 at 14:51
  • @YosefBaskin, did you also mean that saying 'road accidents are happening because people do not follow traffic rules' is also normal sentence? – Ahmed Jan 29 '23 at 14:54
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    Yes. Road accidents happened always and are still happening, because people do not follow traffic rules and they never will. – Yosef Baskin Jan 29 '23 at 14:56
  • I don't know why this question is closed since the related question is totally different from mine. – Ahmed Jan 29 '23 at 15:13
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    I closed it because the answer given by John Lawler to that question equally applies to this one. So, there is no "sequence of tenses" rule that can apply here. Use whatever tense you mean to use. The choice of aspect and tense for each clause is always made according to the speaker's intent. We select the tense and aspect according to our intended meaning, not in lock step. "I'm wondering what he thought" and "I'm wondering what he was thinking" mean different things. A mechanical rule that forced you to say only one of those would forbid expressing the other. English doesn't work that way. – tchrist Jan 29 '23 at 15:41

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