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ACT English 1.2 Passage Drill 211 Views


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ACT English: Passage Drill 1, Problem 2. What is the right tense for this verb?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the future unreal conditional. Which is

00:08

a verb tense, as well as a lesser-known psychedelic rock band.

00:28

How would you correct the underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

00:32

will be

00:35

And here are the potential answers:

00:38

Will be, or not will be? That is the question, sort of.

00:42

What we are tying to do is figure out the right tense for this sentence's "to be" verb.

00:47

Choice (A) is wrong, because it uses the future tense, which is too definite for the meaning

00:51

this sentence is trying to relate.

00:53

It's not accurate to say that plant classification is above the head of every single "average"

00:58

person in the world.

01:01

Surely, there are some everyday people out there whose thumbs are green enough to comprehend such things.

01:05

(B) gives us the present progressive tense with the word "being."

01:09

Present progressive tense is used to describe action that is taking place now and will continue

01:14

to do so in the future.

01:15

This sentence isn't telling us that average people are, at this very moment, scratching

01:19

their heads as they try to identify plants.

01:22

The sentence is speaking more theoretically, so we'll cross out choice (B).

01:26

Choice (C) is getting warmer. "Should be" is in what's known as the "conditional tense."

01:31

To be more specific, it's in the future unreal conditional tense. Anybody else feel like

01:38

we just entered the Twilight Zone?

01:40

Future unreal conditional isn't as complicated or "out there" as it sounds. We use this tense

01:45

to describe things that might happen in the future, but aren't definite.

01:48

Check out this sentence for example: Somebody should tell Kanye to stop putting his foot in his mouth.

01:53

Here, we're not sure if somebody's going to give this advice to Kanye or not. Although

01:58

we're sure he wouldn't listen even if someone did.

02:01

So, "should" is still not quite the right word for this sentence.

02:05

There's nothing wrong with future unreal conditional here, but the connotation of the word "should" just doesn't fit.

02:11

It implies that average people are supposed to be confused by plant classifications.

02:18

Choice (D) gets it right with "can be," which is also in the future unreal conditional tense.

02:24

This time, though, connotations don't derail the whole thing.

02:27

The use of the word "can" implies that it's entirely possible that average people might

02:31

have a tough time classifying plants, but that it's not completely impossible they'd

02:35

do OK with it.

02:37

Score one for the common man.

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