two more quizzes finished last night

The quizzes for Grammatical Mood, Part 4 and Grammatical Mood, Part 5 are done (or just go visit the Test Central blog and scroll down).

Sample questions follow.

Part 4:

Question 5

(a) A pox _____ upon your village. (indicative)
(b) A pox _____ upon your village. (subjunctive)

was, bewere, bebe, isis, be

REASONING: The indicative mood is for brute declarations of fact and opinion, so the question to ask yourself is: Which verbs convey the meaning of a brute declaration, like a factual sentence in a biography? The subjunctive mood, by contrast, is for things like wishes; necessity; and strong recommendations, suggestions, or proposals. So what fits?

1st possible answer: Yes. A pox was is a declaration of fact: This happened.

2nd possible answer: No. Were is a plural conjugation; pox is singular.

3rd possible answer: No. Be would make the first sentence subjunctive. Is would make the second sentence indicative. Exactly backward.

4th possible answer: Yes. A pox is is a declaration of fact: This is happening now. Be is used for the present subjunctive when making a wish or expressing a desire.

Part 5:

Question 1

Which, if any, are correct?

If I ever see that damn fox again; I’d kill that little fucker.If you sass back one more time, I’ll eat your toes, too.We would never have hired the strippers if we’d known the party was for Father O’Malley.Would they have bought suicide vests, if they’d thought their leader was serious?

REASONING: This unit is largely about if-conditional sentences, which follow certain rules of tense and punctuation. Look at these sentences: If you do that again, I'll kill you. I'll kill you if you do that again. So if the if clause comes first, use a comma. If not, don't use a comma. In this particular example, note how the clause tenses go: (if) present → (main) future. Since you've obviously read the lesson (cough), you know there are, in fact, four situations when it comes to the tense grammar for if-conditional sentences:

Keep all of the above in mind.

1st possible answer: No. The semicolon ruins everything. It should be a comma.

2nd possible answer: Yes. Everything fits—punctuation, tense grammar, etc.

3rd possible answer: Yes. Everything fits—punctuation, tense grammar, etc.

4th possible answer: No. The if clause comes last, so there should be no comma.

So—good luck with the quizzes. You'll have noted that, every time the quizzes reset, you get different questions, and the positions of the answers to each question will also shift (which is possible because a given question might pop up again in a subsequent version of the quiz). I built this order-randomization into every quiz to prevent silly people from trying to memorize answer patterns instead of just studying and learning the old-school way. I also create three or four versions of each of the five quiz questions, and I also randomize the order in which the quiz questions appear; that's three levels of randomization. My ex-boss saw this randomization when he visited my place once, and he made a face as he realized the misanthropic degree of my mistrust of humanity. As always, the quiz questions are multiple choice but designed in such a way that random guessing generally won't give you a 25% probability of being accidentally correct: the probability is more like 1 out of 16.

I'll eventually be working on other types of question formats: fill in the blank, matching, sequencing, etc. Those formats will appear when I eventually start putting out tests. Oh, yes: test are coming. Those will be 20 questions apiece—a lot of work to create.