ShmoopTube

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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the future unreal conditional. Which is

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a verb tense, as well as a lesser-known psychedelic rock band.

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How would you correct the underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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will be

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And here are the potential answers:

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Will be, or not will be? That is the question, sort of.

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What we are tying to do is figure out the right tense for this sentence's "to be" verb.

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Choice (A) is wrong, because it uses the future tense, which is too definite for the meaning

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this sentence is trying to relate.

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It's not accurate to say that plant classification is above the head of every single "average"

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person in the world.

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Surely, there are some everyday people out there whose thumbs are green enough to comprehend such things.

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(B) gives us the present progressive tense with the word "being."

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Present progressive tense is used to describe action that is taking place now and will continue

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to do so in the future.

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This sentence isn't telling us that average people are, at this very moment, scratching

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their heads as they try to identify plants.

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The sentence is speaking more theoretically, so we'll cross out choice (B).

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Choice (C) is getting warmer. "Should be" is in what's known as the "conditional tense."

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To be more specific, it's in the future unreal conditional tense. Anybody else feel like

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we just entered the Twilight Zone?

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Future unreal conditional isn't as complicated or "out there" as it sounds. We use this tense

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to describe things that might happen in the future, but aren't definite.

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Check out this sentence for example: Somebody should tell Kanye to stop putting his foot in his mouth.

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Here, we're not sure if somebody's going to give this advice to Kanye or not. Although

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we're sure he wouldn't listen even if someone did.

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So, "should" is still not quite the right word for this sentence.

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There's nothing wrong with future unreal conditional here, but the connotation of the word "should" just doesn't fit.

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It implies that average people are supposed to be confused by plant classifications.

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Choice (D) gets it right with "can be," which is also in the future unreal conditional tense.

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This time, though, connotations don't derail the whole thing.

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The use of the word "can" implies that it's entirely possible that average people might

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have a tough time classifying plants, but that it's not completely impossible they'd

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do OK with it.

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Score one for the common man.

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