Complete the nosy coworker's whispered gossip by dragging the correct words into the blanks.
"I asked the new guy whether he ate the last chocolate donut."
"I also need to find out why he was acting so suspiciously in the breakroom."
"I asked the new guy whether he ate the last chocolate donut."
When embedding a yes/no question into another sentence, we must use "if" or "whether." We cannot use "that."
"I also need to find out why he was acting so suspiciously in the breakroom."
Even though it starts with a question word ("why"), this is an indirect question. We must use normal sentence word order (Subject + Verb -> "he was"), not question word order ("was he").
Questions
If you've ever asked You like coffee? with rising intonation and gotten a confused look — you've felt the gap between casual and grammatical English questions. Many languages form questions with intonation alone, but English usually requires inversion (Are you ready?) or do-support (Do you like coffee?). Skip the structure and your questions sound like uncertain statements.
Questions in English use inversion of subject and an auxiliary (Can she dance?) or do-support when no auxiliary is present (Does the milk go in the fridge?). Yes/no questions, wh-questions, negative questions, and tag questions all share this machinery.
Indirect speech
If you've ever tried to retell what someone said and ended up with a verb-tense mess (She said she will come — wait, would come?), you've hit indirect speech. The rules look intricate but reduce to one move: when the reporting verb is past, shift everything in the reported clause one step into the past. Master that and reporting other people's words stops being a guessing game.
Indirect speech reports what someone said without quoting them: "I like apples" → He said that he liked apples. The core mechanism is backshift — tenses retreat one step into the past — plus pronoun and time-expression shifts.
B2 | Upper Intermediate
If a university admissions team or visa office has ever asked you for an English test score, B2 is probably the level they had in mind. It's the threshold where your English stops being a constraint and starts being a tool — and the line between B1 and B2 is often the line between "stuck in beginner classes" and "ready to study or work in English."
B2 is the upper-intermediate level in the CEFR framework, demanding flexible control of mixed conditionals, passive voice across tenses, reported speech with backshifting, and participle clauses.
Difficulty: Medium
If easy questions feel too obvious but hard questions leave you guessing, you're probably ready for Medium — the level where most real learning happens. It pushes just enough to expose the rules you don't quite have yet, without burying you in edge cases. This is where steady fluency is built, one well-aimed challenge at a time.
The Medium difficulty tag marks middle-range challenges — typically A2 to B1. One rule per question, realistic distractors, and contexts that require active thought rather than instant recognition.