ABE English Tutorials/simple sentences/Verb Participles

Verb Participles
When you looked at the list of irregular verbs, you no doubt noticed another type of verb: the past participle. The past participle is another kind of past tense. But when do we use just the "past" tense, and when do we use the "past participle"? Usually we use these correctly without thinking:

I swam yesterday: Means that we did swim yesterday; the action is over and done with.

But...

I have swum every summer of my life: Means that we swam many times in the past, and are likely to do it again. The past participle implies more of a continuing action. Fortunately, most verbs form their past participle in a very regular way:

As you can see, most past participles are formed by just using "has" or "have", plus the usual past tense of the verb. But the list of irregular verbs shows some of the verbs which use an irregular past participle.

But how can you tell whether a sentence needs the "plain" past tense, and when it needs the past participle? Check to see if the verb you need already has a helper verb in place. If it does, you need a participle. Here's an example:

(draw) The young boy _________ a picture of a dinosaur. In this case, we would use just the usual past tense:

The young boy drew a picture of a dinosaur.

Here's another example:

(draw) The toddler has ____________ a picture of his mother. In this case, we can see that the sentence already has a helper verb, the word "has". This is a clue that the blank must be filled with a participle. The past participle of "draw" is "drawn". So we must write:

The toddler has drawn a picture of his mother.

Answers
 * 1) lived (same for past tense and past participle)
 * 2) ate (you only need the past tense because there is no helper verb in this sentence)
 * 3) caught (this is an irregular verb, but it is the same for the past tense and past participle)
 * 4) taken (you need the past participle because the helper verb "has" is already there)

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