Because of a problem I ran into I am trying to get a quick start in covering with arithmetic progressions.

First I want to say I am aware of this previously asked question:
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/80494/covering-mathbbn-with-prime-arithmetic-progressions

Similarly to what is asked there I am interested in covering with arithmetic progressions of the type $A_{i}=k_{i}+np_{i}$ where $p_{i}$ is prime, $k_{i} \in \mathbb{N}$ and $n \in \mathbb{N_{0}}$. 

Differently, my interests are however in covering of finite sets of the type $\{1, 2, \ldots, N\} \subset \mathbb{N}$ where $k_{i}<p_{i}$ and $p_{1} \leq p_{i} \leq p_{m}$.

By checking out some numbers it looks like that if all $k_{i}=p_{i}-1$ the covered set is $\{1, 2, \ldots, p_{m+1}-2 \}$.

My main questions are:

1.  If all $k_{i}=p_{i}-1$ is the covered set always $\{1, 2, \ldots, p_{m+1}-2 \}$, that is $N=p_{m+1}-2$?.
2.  Will all sets of $k_{i}$ values where one or more $k_{i}<p_{i}-1$ give less coverage?

Additional questions/help.
I would appreciate all relevant information possible, like: Has this been proved?, Then by whom?; Any textbooks discussing this or very similar kind of problems; Websites; etc.