Complete the roommates' passive-aggressive sticky notes on the fridge. Drag the correct question tags to the end of their sentences.
"You didn't take out the garbage again, did you?"
"I am the only one who cleans the bathroom around here, aren't I?"
"Let's try to be better roommates this month, shall we?"
"You didn't take out the garbage again, did you?"
A negative statement ("didn't take") must be followed by a positive question tag.
"I am the only one who cleans the bathroom around here, aren't I?"
The standard, grammatically accepted negative tag for "I am" is the irregular form "aren't I?".
"Let's try to be better roommates this month, shall we?"
The standard question tag for sentences beginning with "Let's" (Let us) is always "shall we?".
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.
Auxiliary verb
If you've ever wondered why English asks Do you know? instead of Know you?, or how a single sentence can carry tense, aspect, AND voice (has been being cleaned), you've felt the work of auxiliary verbs. They're tiny words that quietly carry most of English's grammatical machinery — get them wrong and questions, negatives, and tenses all fall apart.
An auxiliary verb combines with a main verb to add grammatical meaning. The English auxiliaries are be, have, do, and the modal verbs (can, will, should…). They handle questions (Do you?), negation (don't), tense and aspect (has gone, is going), and passive voice (was eaten).
Negation
If your native language uses double negatives (I don't see nothing) — like Russian, Spanish, or French — you've probably been told this is wrong in English and not been entirely sure what the fix is. Standard English uses one negative per clause: either I saw nothing or I didn't see anything, never both. Once you internalise that single rule, your written English clears up a lot.
Negation in English uses not after an auxiliary or modal verb: I am not going. Without an auxiliary, you add do-support (I do not go). Negative words like never and nobody already negate the clause — adding not on top creates non-standard double negatives.
Imperative mood
If you've ever told a stranger Sit down! in English and watched their face drop, you've felt the imperative's main pitfall: it's grammatically simple but socially loaded. In English, bare commands often come across as rude, even when you mean them politely. Knowing when to soften them (Could you sit down?) is what separates abrupt from polite.
The imperative mood is the form for commands, instructions, and requests: Sit down, Don't touch, Have a nice trip. Bare verb form, no stated subject, negated with don't.
Clause
If you've ever been told your sentence is a "run-on" or that you've used a comma where there should be a semicolon — you've hit the limits of writing without seeing clauses. Get this concept solid and most punctuation problems quietly disappear: you can finally tell a complete thought from a fragment without guessing.
A clause is a grammatical unit built around a verb, usually with a subject and a predicate. Independent clauses stand alone (I missed the bus); dependent clauses can't (Because I overslept). Combine them and you build complex sentences.
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.