English - tenses, conditionals, passive and reported speech
This paper tests practical English at intermediate level: tenses, conditionals, passive voice, reported speech, prepositions and common vocabulary, plus a short reading and writing task. Questions are usually gap-fills, sentence transformations or short answers, so recognising the grammatical signal inside the sentence matters more than translating word by word.
Tenses that decide the answer
- Present simple for habits and general facts; present continuous for actions happening now or fixed future arrangements.
- Present perfect (have/has + past participle) for a situation that started in the past and continues, or a past action with a present result. It never goes with a finished time expression such as "yesterday" or "in 2010".
- Past simple for finished actions with a definite time.
- Past perfect for the earlier of two past actions.
Conditionals and modals
- First conditional: if + present simple, will + infinitive.
- Second conditional: if + past simple, would + infinitive (unreal present).
- Third conditional: if + past perfect, would have + past participle (unreal past).
- Never put "will" or "would" in the if-clause.
Passive and reported speech
- Passive: be + past participle; the agent is introduced by "by" and is often omitted.
- Reported speech: backshift one tense (present to past, past to past perfect) and change pronouns and time markers (now to then, today to that day).
Worked example
"I ____ (live) in this town since 2010." Reasoning: "since" introduces a starting point and the situation clearly continues up to the present, so a present perfect is required: "have lived". Compare "I lived there in 2010", where "in 2010" marks a finished period and the past simple is correct. Answer: have lived.
Traps that cost marks
- "Since" with a point in time, "for" with a duration: since 2010, for ten years.
- False friends: "actually" means in fact, "eventually" means finally, "attend" means go to, "assist" means help.
- Forgetting the third person -s in the present simple.
- "Used to + infinitive" (past habit) versus "be used to + -ing" (be accustomed to).
- Double negatives and missing articles in short written answers.