Two transformations, three minutes, four constraints
Marta is 40 minutes into the rozszerzona paper with six minutes left for two transformation items. Each answer must use the given word unchanged, in two to four words, and must keep the meaning of the original sentence. Item 9: 'I'm sure he didn't take the money.' Given word: CAN'T. Item 10: 'It wasn't necessary for you to pay, but you did.' Given word: NEED. For item 9 she hesitates between 'He can't take the money' and 'He can't have taken the money', then remembers that a classmate wrote 'couldn't have taken' last term and still got the point. For item 10 she has two candidates: 'You didn't need to pay' and 'You needn't have paid'. Both are well formed, she cannot check, and three minutes remain. Her working rule so far has been simple: if it sounds natural and the words fit the gap, write it.
1. Item 9: which answer should Marta write, and how should she deal with the memory of her classmate's 'couldn't have taken'?
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Write He can't have taken the money. Three constraints have to be satisfied at once, and Marta is trading one against another.
- Prompt word, unchanged. CAN'T must appear exactly as printed. 'Couldn't have taken' expresses the same past certainty and is a perfectly good sentence in isolation, but it substitutes a different modal for the prompt. In this task type the prompt word is a fixed item, not a hint, so a substituted word scores zero even though the meaning is right. If the prompt had been COULDN'T, the reverse would apply.
- Meaning, including time. 'I'm sure he didn't take the money' locates the certainty in the past. 'He can't take the money' uses can't with a bare infinitive, which talks about present ability or permission - a different sentence. Certainty about a past event needs modal + have + past participle: can't have taken.
- Form and length. Four words, inside the limit; 'have took' would break the perfect.
So the classmate's memory is not a counter-example - it is a different item with a different prompt word.
2. Item 10: choose between 'You didn't need to pay' and 'You needn't have paid', justifying the choice from the implication of the original.
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Write You needn't have paid.
The decisive part of the original is the second clause, 'but you did'. The sentence does two things at once: it says the payment was unnecessary, and it asserts that the payment happened.
- 'You needn't have paid' is needn't + perfect infinitive. It refers to something that was done and says the doing of it was unnecessary. Both components survive: the action happened, and it was not required.
- 'You didn't need to pay' is the past simple of need. It states that there was no necessity, and in normal British usage it suggests the person did not pay - it is the standard way of describing an unperformed obligation. Choosing it drops the 'you did' element, so the meaning shifts even though nothing is grammatically wrong.
If the original had ended at 'It wasn't necessary for you to pay', the judgement would reverse: 'You didn't need to pay' would be the safer answer, because nothing in the sentence would tell us whether the money changed hands.
3. Marta's rule is 'if it sounds natural and the words fit, write it'. Identify precisely where this rule fails, using her two items.
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Her rule tests one thing out of four. 'It sounds natural' tells her a string is grammatical English - necessary, but not sufficient. A transformation item is decided by the conjunction of:
- the exact prompt word, unchanged and not swapped for a synonym - this is where 'couldn't have taken' fails;
- meaning identity, including time reference and implication - this is where 'can't take' and 'didn't need to pay' fail;
- grammaticality and spelling - 'can't have took' would fail here;
- the two-to-four-word limit - 'It was not necessary for you to pay' fails here despite meaning the right thing.
Naturalness is therefore a useful first filter and a dangerous last one: the two answers that feel most natural to Marta are exactly the two that break another condition. In the final minutes she should check the prompt word first and the time reference second, because those are the two conditions candidates break most often under pressure.