Grammar and Vocabulary in Context
This section fills blanks in short passages and single sentences. It checks the grammar points Japanese junior high English returns to every year - tense and aspect, agreement, infinitives versus gerunds, participles, relative pronouns, comparatives, conditionals, prepositions and conjunctions - plus word-form changes such as turning a verb into a noun or an adjective.
Rules that hold
- Decide the tense from time words before you look at the options: yesterday, since 2020, by next week, when I was ten.
- Find the subject and make the verb agree, even when a phrase sits between them: 'The box of old letters was ...'.
- Learn verb patterns as chunks: enjoy -ing, want to, look forward to -ing, let someone do, be made to do, have something done.
- After a preposition, use a noun or gerund, never a base verb.
- In relative clauses, the missing word is the object when a noun follows the gap (the book which I bought) and the subject when a verb follows (the man who bought it).
- For word-form items, look at the word before the blank: an article or possessive needs a noun, an adverb needs an adjective.
Worked example
'This is the song ( ) by the students last week.' Options: (1) wrote (2) written (3) writing (4) writes. Reasoning: the song cannot write, so it receives the action; 'by the students' marks the doer; a past participle alone carries the passive meaning and matches last week. Answer: (2).
Traps that cost marks
Translating from Japanese word by word, which produces 'enjoy to ski' and 'I am looking forward to meet you'; shifting tense halfway through a sentence; using an adjective where an adverb is needed (He sings good); and picking an option that sounds natural but breaks the verb pattern the sentence has already set up.