Complete the sci-fi movie reviewer's plot summary by dragging the correct grammatical structures into the gaps.
In the year 3022, it is said that the MasterChef 3000 suddenly gained sentience. Shortly after the malfunction, the robot chef is alleged to have poisoned the planetary governor's soup with hot sauce. Now, heavily armed and barricaded in the kitchen, the mechanical menace is reported to be demanding three tons of premium garlic before it will surrender.
In the year 3022, it is said that the MasterChef 3000 suddenly gained sentience.
When reporting a general belief using a that clause, we use the impersonal pronoun It (It is said that...).
Shortly after the malfunction, the robot chef is alleged to have poisoned the planetary governor's soup with hot sauce.
The poisoning is a completed past action, so we follow the passive reporting verb with a perfect infinitive (to have poisoned).
Now, heavily armed and barricaded in the kitchen, the mechanical menace is reported to be demanding three tons of premium garlic before it will surrender.
The demanding is an ongoing action in the present, so we use the continuous infinitive (to be demanding).
Passive voice
If your writing has been called "weak" or "evasive" — Mistakes were made, It was decided that... — you've hit the passive voice's main pitfall. Used deliberately, the passive is precise and useful: it foregrounds the action when the doer doesn't matter. Used by default, it makes prose feel like nobody's responsible for anything.
The passive voice is formed with be + past participle and turns the object into the subject: The chef cooked the meal → The meal was cooked (by the chef). Useful when the action matters more than the doer; overused, it makes writing feel evasive.
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.
Infinitive
If you've ever written I enjoy to swim or He let me to go and only later learned why both are wrong — you've hit the infinitive's main puzzle. English is fussy: some verbs demand the to-infinitive, some demand the bare infinitive, some demand the gerund, and a few accept multiple options with different meanings (remember to lock vs remember locking).
The infinitive is the basic form of a verb, used non-finitely. The to-infinitive (to go) follows verbs like want, decide, plan; the bare infinitive (go) follows modal verbs (can, will) and causatives (Let him go).
Pronoun
If you've ever paused before who vs whom, its vs it's, or me vs I — you've felt how much weight pronouns carry in English. They're tiny words but they're case-sensitive (I vs me), context-dependent, and one of the few places where everyday English still trips careful speakers. Get the common patterns right and you instantly sound more careful.
A pronoun is a closed class of small words that replace nouns or noun phrases. Types: personal (I, you, he…), demonstrative (this, that), relative (who, which), interrogative (who?, what?), reflexive (myself), and indefinite (everyone, nobody).
Verb
If grammar feels overwhelming, the fix is almost always to focus on verbs first. They carry the action, the time, the mood, and the voice — a single verb form decides whether your sentence reads as past or present, fact or hypothetical, active or passive. Get verbs solid and the rest of grammar suddenly looks much smaller.
A verb expresses action, state, or occurrence — the engine of every English sentence. Most verbs have five forms (base, -s, past tense, past participle, -ing); be has eight; modal verbs have fewer. Verbs carry tense, aspect, mood, and voice.
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: Hard
If easy and medium questions are clicking but you still feel exposed in real conversation or formal writing, you've outgrown the basics. Hard material is where the gaps you didn't know you had show up: the distractor that "sounds right", the rule that interacts with another rule, the case where context changes the answer. It's where genuine fluency is built.
The Hard difficulty tag marks upper-intermediate to advanced challenges — typically B2 and above. Interacting rules, edge cases, plausible distractors, and contexts that require genuine understanding rather than surface pattern-matching.