A Small Test on English Grammar

wbady

原帖由 hog.wash 於 10-11-20 10:00 發表


I will say yes in daily Englsih but I will advise against using it in exam English. However, if we continue the original conversation this way. "All right. Tomorrow we have lunch together, do some s ...

Thanks for the explanation. I'm wondering if you could provide more questions later on? I find them very interesting .

hog.wash

原帖由 stccmc 於 10-11-20 20:24 發表


I am a bit surprised my girl got this right.

As you always say reading is the best route to take.

hog.wash

原帖由 stccmc 於 10-11-20 13:12 發表
How many times have you watched Avatar?

I have watched it 3 times.

The use of present perfect is right in this context. However, if we see an solitary sentence "I have bought tickets for the untouchable?", that sounds odd. May be it is just me.

Just google "I have bought" and see how many entries you get.

Actually, there has been a trend of accepting simple past tense in the place of present perfect tense in American Englsih. It is perfectly acceptable in my example to say I bought the tickets in American English. But there are still more people saying I have bought

[ 本帖最後由 hog.wash 於 10-11-20 22:08 編輯 ]

hog.wash

原帖由 stccmc 於 10-11-20 23:29 發表
Googling "I bought" gave 116 million hits, whereas "I have bought" returned 16 million.

I am not saying "I have bought" is wrong, I am saying it depends on the context.

I am just a simple science  ...

Never mind la.

But when I asked you to google it, I meant to ask you to look at the context of the sentences in which "I have bought" is used.

If you had googled "I buy", it would have come back with 1.18 billion results. It certainly does not mean we then use "I buy" in my example.

[ 本帖最後由 hog.wash 於 10-11-21 00:16 編輯 ]

hog.wash

Dear stccmc

One more point. Now you have a question; this will be the proper time to look it up in a grammar book. I only learnt grammar this way. 會有心機啲，入腦啲，記得實啲。

hog.wash

原帖由 stccmc 於 10-11-21 09:33 發表


My google returned 116,000,000 hits with "I bought", that is 116 millions.

Hey,

1.18 billion = 1180 million

I googled "I buy" again a minute ago, it changed to 1.35 billion. Funny google.

Never mind lah. But if you looked it up, you might find out I was wrong and correct me. I am wrong all the time as I did not read English at university either.

I'll be off to 飲茶啦. Talk to you later.

hog.wash

原帖由 hog.wash 於 10-11-20 00:17 發表



Answers:


1.a. fall
1.b. reading
1.c. either form will do


Primary school teachers normally tell the students the bare infinitive and the –ing form are interchangeable. In fact they seldom are.  ...

Some follow up explanation on Q2

The following is copied from BBC Learning English website:

"English speakers often use the present continuous tense (subject + 'be' = verb-ing) to talk about future arrangements.

I'm spending Christmas and New Year with my Mum and Dad.
We're meeting Susan at 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon."

For readers who are interested to know more, they can go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/flatmates/episode73/languagepoint.shtml

To use simple future tense in the sentence like "when will we watch it?" would have been acceptable if the context of the sentence is not that the tickets have been bought but that they are still discussing whether or not to see the film and no arrangement has been made yet.

Follow up on Q3

That is how I taught my daughters. The error in Question 3 was picked up from their writing. After I told them what went wrong, I asked them a few days later to translate for me sentences like 我想明天不會下雨. This way they would remember. Repetition is the key. Same for mathematics. Before exams I only asked them to redo those questions they made a mistake originally. If they still got it wrong, I would then make up some similar questions with different numbers plugged in. After a while, they could do it themselves in senior forms. That is also how they prepared for the HKCEE. Keep a record of mistakes when they first attempted the past paper questions, then only redo those wrong ones several times. But this approach is more suitable for science students, particularly for multiple choice papers.

[ 本帖最後由 hog.wash 於 10-11-21 18:57 編輯 ]