The correct answers are The servants dare not look her in the eye, The servants do not dare to look her in the eye, and The servants do not dare look her in the eye.
Dare is a fascinating marginal modal that frequently blends rules!
- Modal use: dare not look (No do-support, no third-person 's', bare infinitive).
- Lexical use: do not dare to look (Uses do-support and a to-infinitive).
- Blended use: do not dare look (Uses do-support, but drops the "to" before the infinitive). This is highly common and perfectly correct in negative and interrogative sentences!
"Dare not to look" is incorrect because true modal dare cannot be followed by "to". "Dares not" is incorrect because the subject is plural, and modal dare never takes an "s" anyway.
Modal verb
A modal verb is a special class of auxiliary — can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would — that adds shades of meaning around possibility, ability, permission, obligation, or speculation. I can swim (ability), You should rest (advice), It might rain (possibility), You must leave (obligation).
Modals are grammatically peculiar: no -s in the third person (she can, not she cans), no infinitive, no participle, followed by the bare verb (I can swim, never I can to swim). Mastering them is the move from describing facts to expressing how you feel about them — likelihood, necessity, recommendation.
Auxiliary verb
An auxiliary verb (or "helping verb") is a verb that combines with a main verb to add grammatical meaning — questions, negation, tense, aspect, voice, or modality. The English auxiliaries are forms of be, have, do, plus the modal verbs (can, could, will, would, should, may, might, must).
Auxiliaries are what let you build past tense (have gone), continuous aspect (is going), passive voice (was eaten), and questions (Do you know?). Without them, you can't form most of the structures you need beyond the simple present and past — they're the engine that powers half the tense system.
Negation
Negation in English usually places not after the auxiliary or modal verb: I am not going, She does not know, You must not go. When there's no auxiliary, you add do-support: I go → I do not go. Most combinations contract: don't, can't, won't, isn't.
The trickiest rule for many learners: double negatives are not standard English. I didn't see nothing is non-standard; the standard forms are I saw nothing or I didn't see anything. Negative words like never, nobody, nothing already carry the negation — adding not on top doubles up.
Infinitive
The infinitive is the basic, unmarked form of a verb, used when no tense or subject agreement is needed. English has two flavours: the to-infinitive (to swim, to read) and the bare infinitive (swim, read). The to-infinitive follows verbs like want, decide, hope, plan (I want to swim); the bare infinitive follows modal verbs (I can swim) and certain causative verbs (Let him go).
Knowing which form to use after which verb is one of the trickiest distinctions in English — closely tied to the parallel choice of gerund (-ing form). I want to swim but I enjoy swimming aren't interchangeable.
Verb
A verb is a word that expresses an action, a state, or an occurrence — the engine of every English sentence. Most verbs have five forms: base (go), -s form (goes), past tense (went), past participle (gone), and -ing form (going). The verb be is the major exception with eight forms; modal verbs like can and must have fewer.
Verbs carry tense (when), aspect (how it unfolds), mood (the speaker's attitude), and voice (active vs passive). Mastering them is foundational — virtually every other grammar topic depends on getting verbs right.
C1 | Advanced
C1 is the advanced level in the CEFR framework, sitting between B2 and C2. At C1 you stop translating in your head and start thinking in English — handling specialised articles outside your field, picking up implicit meaning, and writing structured arguments on complex topics.
Grammatically, C1 means natural use of inversion (Rarely have I seen…), mixed and advanced conditionals, subjunctive forms in formal contexts, and cleft sentences for emphasis. Most university programmes for non-native speakers and many professional certifications set C1 as their entry standard.
Difficulty: Hard
The Hard difficulty tag marks questions and challenges aimed at upper-intermediate to advanced learners — typically B2 and above. Expect interacting rules, edge cases, distractors that look right at first glance, and contexts where the surface meaning and the grammatical answer don't match.
Filter by Hard when you're past the basics and want material that genuinely tests your understanding. These questions catch the gaps your textbook didn't — register-sensitive choices, exception cases, mixed conditionals, the difference between would have been and had been.