Grammar exercises

When speaking and writing, it's important to get the big ideas right. But often two things give intermediate English learners trouble:

While you can learn the rules for verb tenses, prepositions are something you simply have to practice and get used to. And the best way to choose the right verb tense is to get a lot of practice.

To help you with these two difficult topics, we've created fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises that go along with every Story.

In the Grammar exercise, we choose one paragraph from the main story and we've removed certain words. Your job is to use the context of the paragraph (and the provided clues) to fill in the blank with the correct word.

This video shows you how to do it:

Find the Grammar exercise next to any Story. (Select a Story from the Stories Library.)

Click on the tab called "Activities." Then click on the line called "Grammar":

You will see the two exercises: Verb tenses first and Prepositions second.

Your job in the "verb tenses" exercise is to type the correct verb (in the correct tense) in each blank space. In this exercise, you should concentrate on selecting the correct tense, not on guessing the correct verb. So we have given you the correct verb in the infinitive form.

To see the verb in the infinitive form, click the "i" icon in each blank:

In the example above, for example, you know that the correct verb is "to have". Your job is to determine the tense and fill in the blank. In this case, the correct tense is the present, so we write "have".

After you have finished filling in each box, click "check" to see if you got each one right:

If the correct verb in the context is negative, we will indicate that in the hint. For example:

In the above example, the infinitive verb is "to be." The tense is the present "this is" and because it's negative, we write, "is not"

In cases where a contraction may be appropriate, you can either use the contraction (isn't) or write the individual words (is not) and both will be marked correctly.

The correct answer may be any of the main tenses. This table from Grammarly nicely shows the potential tenses you might encounter:

Source: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/verb-tenses

Phrasal verbs are verbs that change meaning when a preposition immediately follows the verb. For example, "take" means something different from "take off."

When the correct answer is a phrasal verb, the hint will indicate the full correct phrasal verb in the infinitive form. For example:

Your job in the "Prepositions" section is to fill in the blank with the correct preposition. You can do this exercise without any hints.

Here is a list of the most common single-word prepositions in English, according to the Cambridge Dictionary (words in bold are the ones most often used in this exercise):

Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/prepositions

Not sure what preposition to choose? We click the "i" icon to get three potential options. The correct answer will be one of the options:

Click "Check" to see how many you got correct and "Show Solution" to see the correct answers.