Grammar

You probably know lot's of English words, and that each word can have different forms depending on the sentence structure. Put your understanding of English language grammar to the test with this exercise! Read through the ten sentences and choose the correct form for each missing word.

Link: Can you guess the tenses?

"This shirt costs $50."

"This shirt is costing $50."

Which is correct? Why?

The first sentence - "This shirt costs $50" - is correct because the price of the shirt is fixed; it's a fixed state and therefore we use a state verb, costs.

A past participle indicates past or completed action or time. It is often called the 'ed' form as it is formed by adding d or ed, to the base form of regular verbs, however it is also formed in various other ways for irregular verbs. Here we review your knowledge of irregular past participle verbs.

An example of an irregular past participle verb is sung:

"Go diving" or "go to diving'?

When learning English it's important to learn collocations. Collocations are groups of  words that appear together in a sentence. Take a look at the following verb collocations. Each verb goes with a word or phrase:

Take a look at the the following examples of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, subjects and objects:

"Joe ate his banana." - noun

"They ran all the way home." - verb

Take a look at this sentence:

"I like English a lot."

What's the subject, verb and object in the sentence?

I is the subject.
Like is the verb.
English is the object.

English generally follows the sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third.

'This book was written ___ Charles Dickens.'

It's time to test your understanding of prepositions. Take a look at the ten sentences and choose the correct preposition.

Link: Test your Prepositions knowledge!

Let's review some present and past verb tenses. Here you can see eight tenses; read through them to remind yourself of how they are used and then match the tenses to the sentences. The example sentences use the verb eat : eat / ate / eaten

present simple

I eat it.

present continuous

I am eating it.

We have previously looked at how to make comparative adjectives using the following structure:

Cool becomes Cooler
Interesting becomes more interesting