British and American variants: two right answers, and the errors that are not variants

These questions put a verb into a perfect or a past-simple gap, and several of them accept more than one answer. That is the point of the topic: a variant is not a mistake. Two forms can both be correct English, differing in where they are commoner rather than in whether they are allowed. The errors these questions punish are of a completely different kind.

Both forms are codified

A set of everyday verbs — learn, burn, dream and lean among them — builds its past simple and its participle either with -t or with -ed. The -t spelling is the traditional British one; the -ed spelling is usual in American English and is now at least as common in British writing too, and burnt keeps a further life as an adjective. Neither is a learner's regularisation: both are recorded past forms of an irregular verb, which is why an answer key can accept either.

Two further pairs work the same way in the participle slot. British writing has got where American English has gotten for a change of state, and both lit and lighted are current, with lighted turning up most often in front of a noun. American English also records showed as a participle beside shown.

One pair is not interchangeable, and it is the pair worth remembering. Proved is the past simple. Proven is a genuine form of the same verb, standard after have and in front of a noun, and used freely in American English in those positions — but it does not fill a plain past-simple gap. So the working question is never whether a second form exists; it is whether that second form fills this slot.

Where the marks are lost

• Leaving the dictionary form in the gap because the sentence already says when it happened. A time phrase such as last night carries no tense into the verb; the verb has to be marked itself, in whichever of its two spellings.
• Putting a past participle into a plain past-simple slot. A past participle needs have, has, had or a form of be in front of it, so a bare one with a time phrase such as every Sunday last month reports nothing.
• Marking the verb a second time after didn't. The auxiliary already carries the past, so what follows it is the base form.
• Stacking a regular -ed onto a form that is already past. The result looks like a tidy compromise between the two accepted spellings, and it is a shape English never writes.
• Choosing a second form that is real but belongs elsewhere. A participle-shaped variant offered for a past-simple gap is the hardest wrong option here: the argument that both forms are standard is perfectly true and still does not make it fit.
• Picking a neighbouring verb of similar shape instead of the verb under test. A separate verb meaning to make something brighter is not a past form of the verb that means to set a lamp burning.
• Shapes that are not past forms at all. An -ing form needs a form of be beside it to work as a verb, so it can fill neither past slot.

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