Ten questions on the working parts of an English sentence. Nothing here is obscure, but the names have a habit of slipping away years after school.
Grammar terminology has a reputation for being fussy, which is unfair to it. The labels exist for the same reason a mechanic names the parts of an engine: it is much easier to say what is wrong with a sentence when you can point at the piece causing the trouble. These ten cover the parts of speech, a few clause types and the punctuation marks that cause most of the arguments. Where a supposed rule is actually a matter of taste rather than grammar, the explanation says so.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: D. An adjective
Why: Adjectives modify nouns, while adverbs do the same job for verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. English usually puts adjectives before the noun, whereas French and Spanish more often place them after it.
Answer: C. The letter
Why: The direct object is the thing the verb acts on, so it is the letter, with "she" as the subject and "posted" as the verb. Verbs that take no object at all, such as "arrive", are called intransitive.
Answer: B. Shows how a noun relates to another word, often in place or time
Why: In, on, under, before and despite are all prepositions. The rule against ending a sentence with one was imported from Latin grammar and has never described English well.
Answer: A. Marking possession
Why: It signals that the bowl belongs to the dog. The other job of an apostrophe is standing in for missing letters, as in "don't", and ordinary plurals never need one.
Answer: D. Puts the receiver of the action into the subject position
Why: "The window was broken" is passive, while "someone broke the window" is active. The passive is useful when the doer is unknown or beside the point, which is why it is so common in scientific writing.
Answer: C. Joining two closely related complete sentences
Why: It links two statements that could each stand alone but read better together. Its other job is separating items in a list when the items already contain commas.
Answer: B. A relative clause
Why: A relative clause modifies a noun and usually opens with who, which or that. It cannot stand alone as a sentence, which is what separates it from a main clause.
Answer: A. Forms its past tense without adding -ed
Why: Go becomes went and bring becomes brought, with no -ed in sight. Irregular verbs in English are mostly very old and very common words, and heavy use is exactly what protects them from being tidied up.
Answer: D. The base form, usually written with "to" in front of it
Why: To walk and to be are infinitives. The old objection to splitting one, as in "to boldly go", came from Latin, where the infinitive is a single word and physically cannot be split.
Answer: C. A group treated as a single unit
Why: Team, flock and committee are all collective nouns. British English often treats them as plural, as in "the team are winning", while American English usually keeps them singular.
A Germanic language wearing a French coat and carrying a Latin dictionary. Why English spelling is a mess with reasons.
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