 Re: hi all just need some help with the following statements
Goodness -- you could give us a little more than 2 minutes...
1. Yep.
2. That could well be true, but I don't have the statistics to hand.
3. Depends who you ask; but if you ask a grammarian, English doesn't technically have a present tense. "Will" (and the more old-fashioned "shall") are modal verbs and present-tense forms at that. "Will" indicates either a decision which has been reached (as in: "The phone's ringing -- I'll answer it.") or a confident prediction (as in: "You will meet a tall, dark stranger.").
4. Kinda, but it's a bit more subtle than that. The past perfect indicates an action which brought about a state of affairs which was still relevant at a certain time in the past. Confused? Consider this:
Sarah arrived at the house. Gavin had already made a cake.
Sarah arriving at the house refers to a past action. This is now our reference point, so to speak. The next sentence indicates that Gavin made a cake some time before Sarah arrived, and that the cake still existed when Sarah arrived.
5. That partly depends on what you mean by that, but my teachers never taught me this rule.  |