Can You Name the Tenses in This English Verbs Quiz?

This sentence is indeed in the first-person plural ("we"), but that refers to the subject, not the verb. It's present tense because it's happening now, and specifically it's present progressive (rather than present simple, i.e. "We run the marathon") because the action is still in progress/uncompleted.

"Will sing" indicates that Dennis' singing takes place in the future, not the past or present. In terms of option #4, the subjunctive is often referred to as a tense, but it's actually a mood, one that indicates subjective thought (i.e., "I don't think Dennis will sing.") It's more commonly taught in other languages where it more significantly affects conjugation.

"She had been working" is the past perfect progressive; it indicates that in the past, she was continuously working for an amount of time that ended. (In this case, when she decided to start over. "Decided" is the past simple tense, indicating a discrete event at a moment in time.)

The usuage of auxiliary verb "will" indicates the future tense. The additional presence of the adverb "never' and adjective "wholly" complicate the syntax of the sentence a little bit, but this is still the future simple. (If you ignore them, "will kiss" is the main thing.)

"We'd heard" (or, without the conjunction, "We had heard") is an example of the past perfect. The "perfect" aspect is used to highlight the temporal relationship between hearing about a market and creating a quiz.

"I am studying" would be present progressive. Add the auxiliary verb "have" and past participle of "to be" to make "I have been studying," and the sentence becomes present perfect progressive. Finally, launch the sentence forward in time by making it "I will have been studying," and that's future perfect progressive.

Putting "will" before an appropriately conjugated verb makes the future tense. Some grammar buffs contend that English really only has two tense categories — past and present — because the future requires an auxiliary word; they say future is really a subcategory of present. However, for practical purposes, it's taught to English language learners as its own tense.

Although the tense might elude you at first because of the imperative (command) mood and all the negative words, if we convert the sentence mentally to the simpler ("Someone has brought a book with them"), it becomes clearer. The auxiliary word "has" indicates the present perfect.

This is present perfect progressive. The present progressive (also sometimes called "present simple progressive") would be, "We've waited for this bus forever." In some contexts, the two tenses have the same meaning. In others, they have different meanings, or at least different connotations.

The present perfect tense expresses something that happened in the past that specifically affects the person's state of being in the present. It's constructed by combining the auxiliary verb (helping verb) "to have" with the past participle of the main verb. (In this case, "been" and "stood.")

The present perfect is sometimes tricky at first glance because the main verb ("had," in this case) is conjugated in the past tense. The tense indicates a past occurence that, in the context it's being spoken about, is being directly applied to the present. In this particular case, the auxiliary and main verbs are both "to have," which adds extra confusion.

"I had never been happier," is a statement in the past perfect using the auxiliary verb "to have" and the past participle of the main verb "to be" (been). "To be" is an irregular verb; most past participles are formed by adding -ed to the base. (For example: walk + ed = walked.)

So many nouns ..."His address" is the subject of the sentence, and "addressed" (a verb in the past simple tense) describes the action it performed. "Addressing" is a progressive verb (which is clearer if you add "that were" or perhaps "that are" just before it), but the latter part of the sentence cannot stand alone the way "His address addressed addresses" can.

Both "the night" and the speaker ("I") are expanding in the present tense. For whatever reason (cadence, rhyming, artistic license), Cave chooses to express the former in the present simple as a more general statement, whereas with the latter, he uses the present progressive to call attention to the fact that expansion in the process of happening at this very moment.

If you're thrown by the interrogative mood (which here means, "the fact that we gave you a question rather than a statement to evaluate"), you can make the sentence easier to grapple with by reversing the subject and verb: "You are acing this quiz." (There's a vote of confidence for you!)

That's right; for all the flowery language and dark notions, this is strictly present simple. ("Life's," "struts," "frets," "is" ...) Bonus points if you knew that this was from Macbeth, the title character lamenting the death of his wife.

Although it's posed as a question, this is still future progressive. An easier way to think about it is to rephrase it as, "You will be requiring two keys." It uses the auxiliary words "will be" and the present participle of the verb "to require."

Vivid and ludicrous in content though it may be, this sentence is pretty simple in terms of verb conjugation. Twain is speaking in the past tense. It's not progressive, perfect or perfect progressive; "she was" is the past simple conjugation of "she is."

The pasr progressive is formed using the auxiliary (i.e., "helping") verb "was" plus a verb ending in -ing. In this case, there is an adverb modifying the verb phrase "getting sick of." This sentence is a blatant falsehood that does not represent the views of the author or website.

Nothing "simple" about that phrase. At least, not in the grammatical sense. That's an example of the present perfect tense (which is also sometimes just called the "perfect" tense.)

Haha ... Did we trick you? The writer/philosopher was talking about the past in the present. (The present simple, to be exact.) He was warning us about being regressive, hoping we'd be progressive and (on an unrelated note) his full name was originally Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana.

We know the musician is singing in the present tense ... after that, it gets a little murky. The use of the auxiliary verb "to have" combined with a past participle of the verb "to get" would indicate that this is present perfect. However, "I've got" is a colloquialism (and when he just says "got," it's short for the same) that's used as a synonym for "I have," which is present simple. Debate among yourselves.

"We will pay" is the future simple. You know, simple, direct, supported by scientific evidence ... Later in the sentence, we have "we're doing," which is conjugated in the present progressive.

"We heard" is an example of the simple past tense, and "we'll be looking" is the future progressive. Watch out for those trick options that say "simple perfect" or "simple progressive"; "simple" is by definition a tense that is neither perfect nor progressive. In many cases, "simple" won't be stated at all (it's redundant), but it's been used over the course of this quiz for clarity.

The interrogative mood (question format) can throw people, but the key part of this question for identifying the verb tense is "... were you." If you reverse these, you get "you were," a straightforward example of a simple past verb phrase.

"I walk" is an example of the simple present tense, whereas "I will fear" is an example of the simple future tense with the auxiliary "will" added to the main verb. This is from Psalm 23:4 of the Christian Old Testament and is also present in the Hebrew Bible.

"Will" is used as an auxiliary with the verb "to be" in the simple future statement "History will be kind." Then, "I intend" is a simple statement in the present tense. ("To write" is in its infinite form, not a tense, because it is a secondary part of the sentence here.) It's always sobering to remember that winners write history ...

Identifying the future perfect tenses often gives people pause because of all the auxiliary words (will, have). "I have been" would be the present perfect, and "will" bumps the timeframe up to the future. This one might be additionally confusing because the past participle of the verb "to be" (been) is irregular. If your friend had instead said, "I will have been studying in my program for almost 10 years," that would be the future perfect progressive.

"Continuous" is a synonym for "progressive," a tense that we have dealt with extensively over the course of this quiz. The other three, although they are indeed types of verb conjugation, are technically "moods" rather than "tenses." Tenses are concerned with time, whereas moods (as quoted from dailywritingtips.com) are concerned with "the manner in which a thought is expressed."

This is a somewhat unwieldy way to ask whether you'll still be bumming around by the time she arrives, but it is grammatically correct. "You have been working" is the present perfect progressive, and adding the "will" makes it future perfect progressive. (And adding the question mark makes it a question ...)

The use of the perfect aspect is indicated by the auxiliary verb "had." (Remember, "tense" as a broad category denoting whether the action occured in the past, present or future, and "aspect" is a sub-category specifying the action's temporal relationship to the time the speaker's speaking, other events, etc.) If this had been present perfect (there's another use of the past perfect for you), the auxiliary would have been be "have."

As with many sentences that employ the future continous (especially interrogative sentences, better known as "questions") this is a little clunky. However, a grammar whiz like you can surely wrap your brain around it with a little focus.

The sentence begins with "We're" (or "We are.") That's present simple. The second part, the question, is past simple, indicated by the conjugated verb "did" and the lack of auxiliary words like "will" and "have/had."

Questions involving words like who, what and when can be confusing at first glance because the subject isn't immediately clear. Nevertheless, saying "who will" is, for our purposes, grammatically the same is saying "he will," "she will," "I will," etc.

"Why will you be sleeping?" can be converted for our sleuthing purposes to, "You will be sleeping." The word "will" points to the future tense. "Be sleeping," an act in progress, shows that the aspect of the tense is progressive.