CC Verb Mistakes

On the CAEC test, you’ll sometimes see sentence correction questions. A lot of them focus on verbs—so let’s talk about what you need to know.

Every verb starts in its basic form. This is called the base form, or sometimes the infinitive. It’s the version you’d see in the dictionary. For example: go, eat, walk, like, watch. It hasn’t been changed for tense yet.

Now, verbs can change depending on when something happened. That’s called tense. Some verbs are regular and just add E-D to make the past tense. So walk becomes walked, and play becomes played. But other verbs are irregular and change completely. For example, go becomes went, and eat becomes ate.

Here’s the good news—the CAEC test won’t ask you to memorize a list of irregular verbs. That’s not the focus.

What it does focus on is helping verbs—and that’s where students often make mistakes.

Helping verbs include words like would, could, should, will, or can. These verbs work with another verb to show time or possibility. But here’s the part that shows up a lot on the test:

Helping verbs must be followed by the base form of the verb—not the past tense.

Let’s look at an example that you might see on the test.

Listen to this sentence:

We would liked to rent a modern space.

There’s a mistake here. The word would is a helping verb, and it needs to be followed by the base form of the verb. But liked is in the past tense. That’s not correct.

So instead of “would liked,” it should be “would like.”

Here’s the corrected version:

We would like to rent a modern space.

That one small change makes the sentence correct.

This kind of error shows up a lot. Let’s try another one.

Listen to this sentence:

She would went to the store.

That’s incorrect. The helping verb would is followed by went, which is the past tense. But after would, we need the base verb—not the past.

So instead of “would went,” it should be “would go.”

Now listen to the correct version:

She would go to the store.

Let’s do one more.

Here’s the incorrect sentence:

They would watched the game.

That sounds a little off, right? The word watched is past tense, but it’s following the helping verb would. That’s the issue.

It should be:

They would watch the game.

Always check the verb that comes right after a helping verb. If it ends in E-D, or sounds like past tense, that’s a red flag. Helping verbs like would, could, and should always need the base form of the main verb.

So if you see a sentence correction question on the CAEC test, and there’s a helping verb in it, stop and check the next word. That one spot is where the mistake usually hides.

Let’s go try a few examples together and practice fixing these verb errors.

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