Cards, Embedded Questions, and the Park Sentence
Mika is working on a sentence-building exercise. She has eight cards: [Do] [you] [know] [when] [the museum] [opens] [does] [on Sunday]. The rule says: use all the cards except one to make one correct sentence, and do not change the order of the cards you choose. Mika writes: “Do you know when does the museum opens on Sunday?” She uses seven cards and adds an s to open. A second task asks her to combine two sentences: “This is the park. We played tennis there last week.” Her answer: “This is the park which we played tennis there last week.” The teacher says each answer has one problem with word order or word choice and one extra word. Mika has 10 minutes and must write the rule she used in Japanese for her study group.
1. Write the correct sentence for the card task. Which card is not used, and why?
Read the worked answer
Correct sentence: “Do you know when the museum opens on Sunday?” The card “does” is not used.
“Do you know” is already the question. The clause “when the museum opens” is an embedded question, so it uses statement order: subject (“the museum”) + verb (“opens”). It does not use “does” and does not invert the subject and verb. The verb “open” takes -s because “the museum” is third-person singular. Mika’s version, “when does the museum opens,” has two problems: it inserts “does,” and it keeps the -s on “opens.” With “does,” the verb would have to be “open,” but the correct embedded clause needs no “does” at all.
2. Correct Mika’s combined sentence and explain the choice between “which” and “where.”
Read the worked answer
Correct sentence: “This is the park where we played tennis last week.”
Use “where” because the second sentence already has “there” as a place expression. “Where” replaces “there” and means “in/at which.” Mika’s “which … there” doubles the place: “which” would need to be “in which,” and then “there” must be removed. If she wants to use “which,” the sentence must be “This is the park in which we played tennis last week.” She cannot keep both “which” and “there.”
3. Identify the teacher’s “one word-order or word-choice problem” and “one extra word” in each of Mika’s answers.
Read the worked answer
Card task: the word-order problem is “does the museum opens” instead of “the museum opens”; the extra word is “does.” The -s on “opens” is correct in the final sentence, but it is wrong if “does” is kept.
Combined task: the word-choice problem is “which” instead of “where”; the extra word is “there.” The general rules are: an embedded question does not invert and does not use “do/does/did,” and a relative adverb such as “where” replaces the preposition plus “there,” so both cannot remain.