For our followers on Instagram and Facebook, here’s another opportunity to compare your answers from our last grammar challenge to the correct answers posted here. Make sure to read through the explanations and if you have any questions at all, feel free to ask us. Let the learning begin!
Here are the answers:
- Women are good at multi-tasking or so they say.
- Before going to work, I stopped at a cafe.
- I play tennis now and then.
- I’m unsure about how I’ll spend the weekend. / I’m unsure (or not sure) what I’m going to do this weekend.
Let’s explore this further:
1. For regular verbs, the plural form simply gets an ‘s’ at the end, like ‘bird’ and ‘birds’, however there are also many irregular plural verbs. Their plural forms need to be memorized, such as women, mice, children, feet, etc. These verbs do not need an ‘s’ at the end of them. This is the case with the plural noun ‘women’, so bear this in mind the next time you use it! The same can be said for ‘men’, without an ‘s’!
2. If you want to use a verb directly after the preposition ‘before’, make sure that you use a gerund, which is a verb that acts as a noun and always ends in -ing. For example: ‘Before leaving the house, make sure that you’ve turned off the lights!’
3. In this sentence, the wrong tense has been used. When speaking about habits or routines in our life, even if they are not incredibly regular, we use the Present Simple tense. We often include key words in these sentences like ‘now and then’, ‘often’, ‘regularly’, ‘every day/week’. If you wanted to use the Present Continuous tense, like in the incorrect sentence above, then you’d use it if you were talking about something that is happening right now or something that is going to happen in the future, but of course you’d have to leave out the time indicator ‘now and then’.
4. The most natural way to say this sentence would be the second version we’ve given above – I’m not sure what I’m going to do this weekend. This is how native English speakers talk all the time in everyday conversations. The first option we’ve given you is also acceptable, it’s just a bit more formal. However we cannot use ‘pass’ with ‘weekend’, as some students do. We can use pass with ‘time’, for example: I don’t know how to pass the time now that I’ve retired from work.
Stay tuned for the next grammar challenge on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
Happy learning!
