The Do Verb (II)

In the last lesson we examined the special problem people experience when using the verb ‘Do’ in the past tense. May be you have had enough time practising; if you haven’t this lesson will provide you with more room for practice. Now let us move to the problem that remained unresolved in the previous lesson. The two sentences in question were: 1) Youth doesn’t have money. 2) I doesn’t know the answer. In both of these cases the speaker has no problem with the base word. However, a new problem has cropped up. The subject and the verb ought to agree. Again there is a very simple rule that you need to remember to avoid making this kind of mistake. For singular subjects the verb should be plural and for plural subjects the verb should be singular. Having said that I need to remind you that the exception to this rule is the pronoun “I’ – it takes a singular verb. For you to understand this rule you must know what a subject is. The simplest English sentence is made up of a subject and a verb: Jesus wept. The subject is what the sentences talks about. Think of it as the topic of the sentence. Without it there is no sentence. The normal position for the subject is before the verb. Back to our rule we examine how to apply it. We will start with the plural subjects. 1) I do not know the answer. (Exception to the rule) 2) We do not know the answer. 3) You do not know the answer. 4) They do not know the answer. 5) John and Jane do not know the answer. 6) The youth do not know the answer. Now let us examine the singular subjects. 1) He does not know the answer. 2) She does not know the answer. 3) It does not know the answer. 4) Jane does not know the answer. N.B. the word youth refers to young people in general. I promised you that we shall get more practice for the previous lesson. Here it is, rewrite all these sentences in the past tense e.g. I didn’t know the answer. Remember the key point is to maintain the base form of the verb. In the next post we shall look at question tags that require the ‘do’ verb.