These questions are built on verbs whose past participle is spelled exactly like the form you started from. They ask you to choose or to type the right form, to sort verbs by their pattern, or to judge finished sentences. Two of the three slots look identical, so the whole risk lies in reaching for the odd one out at the wrong moment.
Two spellings for three slots
Spelled out, the pattern is come — came — come, the shape the topic is named after. There are three slots as always — base, past simple, past participle — but the third returns to the spelling of the first. Only the middle slot holds a word of its own, and that word has exactly one job: to report a finished event by itself, with no auxiliary in front of it.
Other irregular verbs behave differently. Some reach a third, separate spelling in the participle; others collapse both past slots into one shared word. So the pattern is a property of the particular verb and cannot be read off the length or the ending of the word: two verbs that rhyme can sit in two different families. The members of this one are few, and they are learned as a list rather than worked out from the spelling.
The decision itself is short. If have, has or had stands in front of the gap, the sentence wants the participle, and here the participle is the base spelling — the very form you were handed in the brackets. If there is no auxiliary and the sentence names a finished moment, only the middle form will do. And because the whole family is irregular, no regular -ed spelling is ever a candidate: those words simply do not exist.
| What the sentence shows | Which form it needs |
|---|---|
| has, have or had before the gap | The past participle, spelled exactly like the base. |
| no auxiliary, and a stated past moment such as last night or back in June | The past simple — the family's one distinct word. |
| a modal, or the word to, before the gap | The base form. |
Where the mistakes come from
| What tempts you | Why it is wrong |
|---|---|
| comed | A regular past invented for an irregular verb. No verb in this family takes that ending, and the -ed spellings built for them do not exist in English. |
| leaving the verb untouched for a finished event | Because the base and the participle are spelled alike, an unchanged verb feels safe everywhere. In a clause that names a past moment and carries no auxiliary it leaves the sentence with no past tense at all, and that is the one position where the middle form is compulsory. |
| putting the middle form after has, have or had | A past simple never follows a perfect auxiliary. The trap is sharper here than elsewhere: the word that looks most like a past tense is precisely the wrong one in that slot, because the slot wants the spelling that looks like a base. |
Say the risk out loud before you answer. Two of the three spellings are the same, so nearly every question in this topic is really asking one thing: does the clause contain a perfect auxiliary? Find the auxiliary first, settle the slot, and only then write the word — never the other way round, and never from how the verb feels in the mouth.
Try it
Complete the sentence with the correct form of the verb in brackets: "He has ____ (run) this bakery since his father retired."
Select every verb that follows the base-returning pattern, where the past participle is spelled exactly like the base form.
- become
- come
- begin
- run
- ring
- get