Latest Articles from ELB
The difference between ‘from’, ‘out of’ and ‘among’
Certain prepositions like from, out of and among may be interchangeable in certain contexts, in this comparison with all essentially meaning chosen from a group. For example, these three sentences essentially mean the same thing: I had to choose which I liked best...
Understanding prefixes – sub- (under)
Parts of words in English can often give you valuable clues to their meaning. Prefixes and suffixes usually modify the word they are attached to, so if you understand the meaning of a prefix, you can increase your understanding of a number of new words, and improve...
Gendered pronouns – when to use he, she and it for animals, objects and people
Gender in English is quite different to many languages because objects are generally always treated as neutral, and animals are mostly treated as neutral, even when they have a gender. The result is that the pronouns “he” and “she” are almost always used to refer to...
Mixed grammar words exercise
Having looked at the bare infinitive, past participles and present participles individually, with a variety of exercises to test understanding, this exercise will now combine the knowledge of those three different grammar words. It should be possible to identify, from...
The Present Participle in Mixed Tenses – Exercise
The present participle is a grammar word with many different uses. Some uses are very particular, and depend on its relationships with other verbs (such as following a verb with either an infinitive or +ing form). One of its most common, and most formulaic uses, is in...
Mixed Preposition Phrases Exercise
Prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs often have very specific patterns that are difficult to guess. This means it is sometimes necessary to learn such phrases individually. The following exercise will test a range of prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs in a...
When to use past participles with perfect tenses
Past participles have a number of uses, though mainly they are used for forming grammatical structures such as perfect tenses (We had discovered a key.) or as an adjective form of a verb (We took the discovered key.). In the perfect tenses, past participles come after...
Bare infinitives in the past simple – with exercise
Following on from the exercise testing understanding of the bare infinitive in the present simple, this article tests understanding of how it is used in the past simple. In the past simple, verbs change forms with +ed for regular verbs, or in a variety of ways with...
Spelling rules for verb tenses and participles
As with most areas of the English language, forming different tenses from verbs has some basic rules which can be frequently broken. With irregular verbs, there is often there is no easy way to know how a verb should be spelt in its present or past forms, or as a past...