The three verb forms

There is no task on the exam that says put the verb in the right form. The form has to be chosen or completed inside other tasks, and below it is worked through in the format of each of them: the open cloze, the multiple-choice cloze, word formation, the letter cloze and editing.

There is little to learn by heart for this, only the second and third form of the irregular verbs; the common ones are collected in the table below, fewer than fifty of them. Which of the three forms goes into a gap is decided by the slot the verb has landed in, and you can see the slot before you have recalled the verb.

Took or taken: what tells them apart

Start with a single gap.

Nothing separates took from taken by meaning. What separates them is whether the form is allowed to stand in a sentence alone. One of these two never is, and that is the whole distinction. Notice also that the difference is invisible on a regular verb: stopped is both the second form and the third, so the word itself will not tell you which one you are looking at. Only its neighbour will.

Three forms and a table

Every English verb has three forms, and school grammar simply numbers them: the first, second and third form (also called the base form, the past simple and the past participle).

The first form is the base form, the one printed in the dictionary and in the brackets in the word formation task: take, stop, write.

The second form is the past simple: took, stopped, wrote. It stands in the sentence by itself, with no helpers, and in the past it is the form that carries the tense. (In the present the first form does the same job: they take, she takes.)

The third form is the past participle: taken, stopped, written. As a verb it never stands alone: it follows have (has taken) or be (was taken). Without them it can still work as an adjective (a broken window) or open a shortened clause, that is a sentence part with no tense of its own (Written in 1850, the letter…), but it never carries the tense of a sentence by itself. Past participle is the name you will meet in answer keys and grammars.

An auxiliary verb is a helper verb, have, be or do, that stands next to the main verb and builds a tense, the passive, a question or a negative with it; it has no meaning of its own. Two of them demand the third form: have (has taken) and be in the passive (was taken). After be the -ing form is possible too (was growing), and after do comes the first form (didn't take). The modals can, must, could stand apart: they add a meaning of their own, ability or obligation, and they take the first form: must be, can take.

In regular verbs the second and third forms are the same word, and both are made from the first by adding -ed. What makes the irregular ones irregular is precisely that these two forms have to be remembered separately.

In the list below the irregular verbs are grouped by how those two cells behave, and next to them are the rules that spell the endings -ed and -ing.

Three forms are the entire stock. After that the only question is which of the three the slot in the sentence demands, and on the exam that slot looks different in every task.

The same form in other tasks

Open cloze. Exactly one word goes in, and no options are offered. The gap can be the form itself, or the word in front of it that demands the form.

In all three gaps the form was assigned by the word on the left, and the verb itself could have been any verb. The next gap is settled somewhere else.

Multiple-choice cloze. Four forms of one verb stand under the gap, and all four are real English words.

The relative clause between the subject and the gap is not there by accident: it invites you to read rents as the main verb and close the gap with anything at all. The trick works because you read left to right and reach the gap long after the subject. Reading the sentence back from the gap to its subject costs a second and defuses it.

Where the form is not chosen but spelled

Word formation. If the word in brackets is a verb, it is in the first form, and what goes in is the form the slot demands. In none of the three gaps can you copy the brackets.

Choosing the form was only half the job here: in each of the three gaps the ending still had to be spelled right. There are a handful of spelling rules, and they work the same for a familiar verb and an unfamiliar one. A verb is irregular only in its second and third form; the -ing and -s endings it takes by the general rule, like everyone else.

The last pass

Letter cloze. The beginning of the word is printed; write in what is missing.

The start of the word gave you the verb but not the form: here too the form was assigned by had and was on the left, and the ending was spelled by the same rules as with the brackets.

A preposition demands a form as blindly as has and must do: what you look at is the preposition, not the sense of the phrase.

After make and let: the first form without to

One more word assigns a form, only it does not stand right next to the verb. Make and let take an object and then the first form with no to: made them wait, let the children play. Most other verbs of this shape, ask, tell, want, allow, take to: asked them to wait. Help takes either. In the passive make gets its to back: they were made to wait.

What to take with you

The fastest way to check a form is a single move: look at the word to the left of the verb. If it is have, be, a modal, to or a preposition, that word assigned the form, and you never have to recall what the verb means. After make and let an object stands in between, so look one step further left.

The passive: where the third form follows be, and decides who is acting in the sentence Tenses: where the same third form works with have, while the second stands alone Modal verbs: what each one means, once the form after it is already settled Cloze: where four forms of one verb sit side by side under the gap