Sample English lesson

= Subject-Verb Agreement =

Verbs are usually not too difficult to find: they are the action words in the sentence. However, you have to make sure that you are using the right tense of the verbs; for example, events that happen in the past require past tense verbs. And you have to remember that participles (like: sung, seen, done; and walking, eating, working) are only parts of verbs and always need helper verbs (like: had, have; or is, was) to make them complete.

Subjects can be trickier to find. Subjects, of course, are the doers of the action in a sentence, but this is not always so obvious. It's important to remember that subjects are never found in a phrase. Words like "here" and "there" are almost never the subject of a sentence. Subjects are not always at the beginning of a sentence. And once you find the subject and the verb of a sentence, you have to make sure that they "agree" -- a plural (more than one) subject needs to have a plural verb, for example.

The subject and the verb really are the "heart" of the sentence. Having the subject and verb not "agree" -- or, even worse, leaving one of them out altogether -- shows you up right away as a poor writer.

The subject and the verb are the foundation on which the rest of your sentence is built. If your subject and your verb are not quite right, the rest of your sentence is going to sound "funny", no matter what interesting information you add to it.


 * Answers'


 * Besides her brothers, she has four other relatives in town.
 * The box with the envelopes contains all the insurance information.
 * Either the cookies or the cake is upsetting my stomach.
 * Both Casey and Sue are going to Europe in spring.
 * The balls in this court are in need of repair.

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