ShmoopTube

00:04

And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by verb agreement

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because verb argument gets on everybody's nerves....[Men holding verbs arguing]

00:14

Which answer best fills in the blank Mr. Holmes was not at all surprised to learn

00:18

that the suspect had been in fact innocent and here's the potential answers

00:25

okay well if there were a secret [Sherlock appears beside a bouncer]

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password to get the right answer for this question it would be verb agreement

00:32

right unfortunately nobody ever let our original sentence in on this secret so

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we start off in the past tense with was and then we shift into the past perfect

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continuous with had been..that's a mouthful, we know past perfect continuous

00:48

when we see it because it usually includes the word had been sort of like

00:52

so many NFL football players who twisted a knee... Anyway most of the time [NFL player catches ball and leg falls off]

01:00

this is following up by a present participle aka some verb that ends in

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I-N-G...alright well some examples could be he had been snoring I've heard that [Man snoring in bed]

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before or she had been staying up all night

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point is as soon as we see the words had been we know we're far from simple past

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tense territory we can get rid of choice A because is, is a present tense verb

01:25

it's important that we don't let logic get us off course here and yeah the [Sherlock appears]

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suspect is probably still innocent in the present but we have to stay in the [Suspect grows angel wings and a halo]

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past if we started that way so this sentence is just old-fashioned like that...

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all right if we went with answer C our

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sentence would start in the past and then catapult into the future no thanks [Sherlock catapulted into future]

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C we're totally retro on this one B is the only option that keeps it truly

01:49

old-school the sentence starts out in the past tense by using the verb was so

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we better recycle was in the second half of the sentence... looks like we found yet

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another way in which recycling is important oh people be green [Football player recycling]

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