Verbs are central to the ACT English Test. You might think you already know what a verb is. “Verbs are the thing doing the action,” you say with obvious annoyance at my question. We learned that in primary school! We did. But…

 

Identify the verb in the following sentence: The sky is radiant.

Is it ‘radiant’? That does sound like an exciting word, and it’s possible to picture ‘radiant’ in the mind, but it is not a verb. The verb, ‘is’, leaves much to be desired for supposedly doing an action. Running is fun. In this lesson, we will look at other possible ways to identify verbs and then delve into their construction.

 

Underline the verbs in the following sentences, which appear in “The Real ACT Prep Guide, 3rd Ed.”. Answers appear at the end of this lesson.

 

1. Today, after many birthdays and New Year’s Days, I now find meaningful the difference I once found confusing.
2. Around this time the polka music and button accordion played by German immigrant railroad workers left their mark on waila.
3. Year’s Day in Korean culture is heightened because it is thought of as everyone’s birthday party.
4. His challenge initiated a review of students’ rights and administrative responsibility in public education.

 

Here we see a lot of “action words”, but very few of them are functioning in the sentence as a verb!

 

Before looking at the corrected sentences, let’s review what verbs do in a functional sense.

• Verbs can be conjugated.

           Or stated another way, they do the following:

• Verbs change the way they look when the subject (I, you, the dog, the police, etc) changes (I am, you are, the dog is, the police are)
• Verbs change when the tense (past, present, future, etc) changes (I went, I go, I will go)
• Verbs can be made up of more than one word (was swimming, have been broken, has flown, etc), and when only one of the words that belong in a verb phrase is written in a sentence, it is not a complete and correct verb (swimming – alone is not a verb, broken – alone is not a verb, flown – alone is not a verb).

 

Using these descriptions as a guide, check the example sentences again for verbs. Verbs are the words that will change in form based on the subject and the tense; each selected word should be like that!

 

Now practice changing each of the verbs according to the guidelines below. I’ve listed the original subject found in the sentence. Write the original verb directly from the sentence and then new form(s) of the verb that would result if either the subject or the tense were changed. For sentences that have more than one subject-verb pair, there are two lines. (Hint: You might need to read the rest of the lesson to figure these out!)

	Original subject	Original Verb	Different subject	New verb	Different tense	New subject and verb
1a	I	find	Jason	finds	(future)	I will find
1b	I	found	we	found	(past progressive)	I was finding
2	polka music and button accordion		dance music		(present)
3a	Year’s Day		Holidays		(past)
3b	it		they		(future)
4	challenge		challenges		(past perfect)

 

Verb agreement with the subject

 

If you have ever taken a foreign language, you are likely aware of the word “conjugation”, which indicates that the verbs can change, and you may also know that verbs can change based on the subject in English, too.

 

Here is a chart of verbs that shows how their forms change based on the subject. Are there any patterns?

 

	I (first person singular)	you (second person)	he / she / it (third person singular)	they (third person plural)	we (first person plural)
to be	am	are	is	are	are
to have	have	have	has	have	have
to drink	drink	drink	drinks	drink	drink
to fly	fly	fly	flies	fly	fly

 

There is one very clear pattern: all of the verbs for he / she / it end in -s! In general, “singular” verbs end in -s, and “plural” verbs do not have an -s. A singular verb is one that is used with a singular subject… so if the subject is only one person, thing, or idea, the verb must have an -s. If the subject is plural, drop the -s in the verb.

 

Verb changes based on tense

While it is generally clear to native English speakers when to say “I am at the party” versus “I was at the party”, intuition will help you less in distinguishing which is correct between “I had been at the party for 30 minutes when Susie walked in” and “I was at the party for 30 minutes when Susie walked in”.

 

Distinguishing correct forms and uses of the past tenses (simple past, past continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous) can be particularly challenging – and can appear with great frequency on the ACT!

 

First, let’s see a few examples, all in the he / she/ it form of the verb:

 

	simple present	simple past	past continuous	past perfect	past perfect continuous
to be	is	was	was being	had been	had been being*
to have	has	had	was having	had had	had been having
to drink	drinks	drank	was drinking	had drunk	had been drinking
to fly	flies	flew	was flying	had flown	had been flying

* Uncommon

 

The ACT requires test-takers to know when to use each of these and – more importantly!! – to know when the verb phrase is or is not properly constructed.

 

Simple present  This tense is generally used to describe repeated actions –  “I go to the beach every morning” – and statements that are accepted as truths – “Humans are, as far as we know, native to Earth alone.”

 

Simple past  This tense is used to describe repeated actions that happened in the past – “I left for school every morning at 7am” – as well as single events that had a fixed starting and ending point in the past – “I swam four laps”.

 

Past perfect This tense is often called the ‘past of the past’ and can only be used together with another action in the past, such as “I had already written fourteen pages when the power shut off.” The construction of the past perfect is more complicated than the construction of the simple present or simple past. The past perfect ALWAYS starts with ‘had’ and is followed by the past participle. A very common mistake is to use ‘had’ and then the simple past (‘had drove’), but this construction would not have any meaning. Also, the past perfect is most often used together in a sentence with the simple past.

 

Write below all of the past participles that you can think of. Do you notice any patterns?

__________________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________________

 

Past perfect continuous This tense, similar in function to the past perfect, is constructed very differently. It can similarly be used to describe the ‘past of the past’ and is used when the ‘past of the past’ is interrupted. “I had been cutting vegetables for hours when my sister told me the recipe didn’t call for any veggies.” It always starts with ‘had been’ and is followed by the -ing word, also known as a ‘gerund’ or ‘present participle’. This type of word, ending in -ing, has no exceptions like the past participle.

 

Mark whether the following verbs in bold are properly constructed or not.

 

1. Sandy, once a small girl, had grew fourteen in two weeks.
2. The doctor liked the fact that the plant being tall.
3. I had been swimming for hours when my brother was arriving.
4. I was at the party for 30 minutes when Susie walked in.

 

Explanations:

1. “Had grew” is incorrect since it does not contain any of the proper verb phrases above. It looks most similar to the past perfect, but the past perfect is formed by 1) the past tense of ‘to have’ (had) and 2) the past participle of the verb in question. ‘Grew’ is the simple past form of ‘to grow’. The past participle of ‘to grow’ is ‘grown’. Past participles do not follow any particular pattern and are therefore tricky to identify, but they ARE generally different from the simple past. Participles are discussed at length in the next lesson.
2. “Liked” is correct, but “being” is incomplete. Are there any verb tenses in the chart above that only have a word ending in ‘-ing’? No. Words ending in -ing are often called a ‘gerund’ or a ‘present participle’. In this case, there are several options for how to correct the ‘being’ into a standard verb form, including “the plant was tall”.
3. Both “had been swimming” and “was arriving” are proper verb constructions, so the analysis could end there with a conclusion that everything is correct as written. But here it is important to consider whether the correct forms of the verbs are being used. Both the past continuous and past perfect continuous are used for events in the past that are interrupted or provide context for some other events. In this case, “when” indicates that at a specific moment in the past the brother arrived and, as it happens, the sister was swimming at the time. “Had been swimming” is correct, a continuous activity, but “was arriving” is not correct in conjunction with “had been swimming” and should be changed to “arrived”.
4. Similar in construction to the previous sentence, this sentence also has the word “when” and should follow the form ‘past perfect’ + when + ‘simple past’, for “I had been at the party for 30 minutes when Susie walked in”.

Solutions:

 

Verbs in bold:

 

1. Today, after many birthdays and New Year’s Days, I now find meaningful the difference I once found confusing.
2. Around this time the polka music and button accordion played by German immigrant railroad workers left their mark on waila.
3. Year’s Day in Korean culture is heightened because it is thought of as everyone’s birthday party.
4. His challenge initiated a review of students’ rights and administrative responsibility in public education.

	Original subject	Original Verb	Different subject	New verb	Different tense	New subject and verb
1a	I	find	Jason	finds	(future)	I will find
1b	I	found	we	found	(past progressive)	I was finding
2	polka music and button accordion	left	dance music	left	(present)	they leave
3a	Year’s Day	is heightened	Holidays	are heightened	(past)	It was heightened
3b	it	is thought of	they	are thought of	(future)	It will be thought of
4	challenge	initiated	challenges	initiated	(past perfect)	It had initiated

 

Past participles include the following:

flown, jumped, opened, grown, drunk, sat, driven, been, lived.