Quick Grammar

We use the present perfect tense to talk about things where there is a connection between the past and the present.

To form yes/no questions where there is an auxiliary verb or a modal verb, we invert the word order of a positive sentence. (He is a teacher > Is he a teacher?)

Question tags are the short questions that we put on the end of sentences – particularly in spoken English. There are lots of different question tags but the rules are not difficult to learn.

English doesn’t really have reflexive verbs the way that many other languages do. However, when the same person is the subject and object of the verb we usually use a reflexive pronoun.

Relative clauses add extra information to a sentence by defining a noun. They are usually divided into two types – defining relative clauses and non-defining relative clauses.

Relative clauses add extra information to a sentence by defining a noun. They are usually divided into two types – defining relative clauses and non-defining relative clauses.

When we report what people say, we usually change the tense of the verbs to reflect that we are reporting – not giving direct speech. This pattern is followed when we report questions and there are also other important changes between direct questions and reported questions.

When we report someone’s words we can do it in two ways. We can use direct speech with quotation marks (“I work in a bank”), or we can use reported speech (He said he worked in a bank.)

Remember that in reported speech we usually change the tense of the direct statement. The present simple tense changes to the past simple, the past simple changes to the past perfect and so on.

‘So’ has a number of different meanings and is used in different ways.