These questions take the verbs you use in almost every sentence and ask you to put one of them into the slot a sentence has opened. Some items offer a short list of forms, some ask you to type the form yourself, some show three finished sentences to judge, and some ask you to pick every form that fits.
Three slots, three families
Every verb here has three forms that matter: the base, the past simple and the past participle. Regular verbs fill both past slots with the same -ed word. Irregular verbs mostly do not — they shift a vowel or swap in another word instead, and for the verbs you meet here the -ed spelling is not a clumsy alternative, it is not a form of the verb at all.
Irregular verbs then differ in how many separate words those three slots use. Some travel through three different spellings (freeze — froze — frozen). Some stop at two, with one word covering the past simple and the participle together (lend — lent — lent). A small third family never changes at all and has a topic of its own. Knowing a verb means knowing which of the three it is, because the slot a sentence opens is only half of the answer.
Read the words in front of the gap
The sentence, not the verb, says which slot is open. Look at what stands immediately before the gap, and at the time reference the sentence carries.
| What stands in front of the gap | Which form the sentence needs |
|---|---|
| have, has or had | The past participle. This is a perfect construction: a form that is only a past simple cannot stand in that slot, though a verb whose two past forms share one word uses that same word here. |
| a form of be | The -ing form for an action in progress, or the participle for a passive. |
| nothing at all, plus a finished time reference such as last Friday, yesterday or at the start of June | The past simple, standing alone as the main verb of the clause. |
| a modal such as will or would, or the word to | The base form, with no ending. |
One consequence is worth stating separately: be is the one English verb whose past simple still changes with the subject, so a singular and a plural subject take different spellings in that slot.
Where the mistakes come from
| What tempts you | Why it is wrong |
|---|---|
| bringed, keeped, telled, gived, finded | The regular ending bolted onto a verb that refuses it. These spellings belong to no English paradigm at all. |
| had took | A past simple form placed after an auxiliary. After have, has or had the slot belongs to the participle, and where a verb's participle is a separate word, its past simple cannot take that place. |
| done or known standing alone as a past tense | A participle with nothing in front of it. It needs an auxiliary before it can say anything about time, so a clause about a finished event needs the past simple instead. |
| being, making | The -ing form doing a main verb's job. It describes an action in progress and needs a form of be beside it. |
| gotten for a finished arrival | A past participle of American English, which follows have. In neither variety is it a past simple, so a reference such as yesterday evening rules it out. |
| been offered as a past simple | The participle of be. It works after have, has or had; the past simple of be is spelled differently and varies with the subject. |
| is, do or get under a past time reference | A present-tense form contradicting the very words that closed the period off. |
One habit is worth building before you answer: ask how many separate words the verb actually uses. Plenty of common verbs stop at two — kept and made each cover the past simple and the participle together — so inventing a third, different-looking participle is as much an error as failing to reach one.
Try it
Complete the sentence with the correct form of the verb in brackets: "We had already ____ (think) about that risk before the auditor raised it."
Which sentence uses a form of begin or write correctly?
- The film had already begun when we arrived.
- The concert begun at eight o'clock last Friday evening.
- She has wrote three reports since Monday morning.
Select every form below that can be the past participle of the verb go.
- went
- gone
- goes
- going