Answers and explanations
- Took us three days to. A phrase to show that you need a certain amount of time for a particular action. Don’t forget to make the switch to Past Simple!
- Was not quick enough to. Answering ‘did not have enough time’ is incorrect for two reasons. First, we need ‘to’ and there is no way to squeeze it into the given word limit without sacrificing meaning. Second, it is not about shortage of time, but about Liam being slow.
- To the party apart from. Be careful not to answer ‘except FROM’, as the correct phrasing is ‘except FOR’.
- Advised/warned me against coming close. Both verbs work well with the preposition ‘against’ to show that somebody tells you it is not a good idea to do something. Note that the gerund form should follow both structures. Be mindful of the spelling: ‘advise’ is the verb and ‘advice’ is the noun spelling variant.
- Put her success down to/Put down her success to. To put something down to something else means to give something as a reason. In this case, her determination was the reason for her success.
- To know if we had. Even though ‘whether’ is a perfect replacement for ‘if’, you should not be using it because ‘if’ is given as a key word here and has to be present in the sentence.
- Is hard/impossible to tell if/whether. If you can’t tell something, it means that you have no information about it or you can’t be sure about the things you know. Note the interchangeability of ‘if’ and ‘whether’.
- Still have/has not read the news. The word ‘family’ grammatically can be both singular and plural, depending on whether we mean the family as a whole or each person individually.
- Is Charles coming. Apart from using a phrasal verb, we resort to the Present Continuous to underline the fact of a planned event.
- Has been studying for. We cannot avoid using Present Perfect Continuous – we need the Perfect part because we are not using ‘two months ago’, but simply ‘two months’. The Continuous part is dictated by the preposition ‘for’.
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