For Sharing Knowledge
A wind turbine turns wind energy into electricity using the aerodynamic force from the rotor blades, which work like an airplane wing or helicopter rotor blade. When wind flows across the blade, the air pressure on one side of the blade decreases. The difference in air pressure across the two sides of the blade creates both lift and drag.
The above excerpt is from the article "How do wind turbines work" by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
The verb form that we use most often for describing what something is like or how something works is the one with that S we need to remember.
It’s the simple present. Or SSSimple PreSSSent. The name isn't important. It looks like this:
A dog barks. A cat does not.
A gear turns. A beam supports. A roof protects.
There are a gazillion decent websites that explain English verb tenses. My favourite is this one. It has simple explanations for all the tenses. It also has practice exercises that might help.
We can also look here for a quick reminder of this and other times where we might forget that frightening S.
If you know French well, remember this. If you would say en train de for your verb in French, use ing in English, not that simple present S.
Yusef est en train d'inspecter la fondation.
Yusef inspects is inspectING the foundation. He’s hopING it doesn't need to be replaced.
So before going to bed at night, remember to check for monsters under your bed or in the closet. Or a missing s in your texts...
For Describing an Incident
Thursday, August 12, 2004 started just like any other morning for electrical contractor Donnie Johnson. Except for one thing; Tampa, Florida, the city where he lived and worked, was bracing for Hurricane Charlie, and his job was to wire a large semi-trailer mounted generator to a giant frozen foods warehouse electrical system to prepare for it.
During the process, in a split second, Donnie suffered third-degree burns down to the muscle on both arms and hands, and second-degree burns to his face, head and neck from an arc flash explosion. The heat of the arc blast seared through him at a temperature the burn unit doctors told him was seven times as hot as the sun’s surface.
The excerpt above is from the article "Donnie Johnson: Story of an arc flash survivor" by Kelsey Rzepecki. Almost all the verbs are in the form that is used most in English for telling a story, whether it's an accident report or what we did on the weekend.
It's the ed verb tense, known as the simple past. Check this web page for its basic form and some links to exercises.
If you noticed that some of the verbs in the excerpt above don't end with ed, you're right. Here they are:
Thursday, August 12, 2004 started just like any other morning for electrical contractor Donnie Johnson. Except for one thing; Tampa, Florida, the city where he lived and worked, was bracing for Hurricane Charlie, and his job was to wire a large semi-trailer mounted generator to a giant frozen foods warehouse electrical system to prepare for it.
During the process, in a split second, Donnie suffered third-degree burns down to the muscle on both arms and hands, and second-degree burns to his face, head and neck from an arc flash explosion. The heat of the arc blast seared through him at a temperature the burn unit doctors told him was seven times as hot as the sun’s surface.
They're still in the same verb tense but they're part of that long list of exceptions that don't take ed in the simple past. Here's a list of "I never take an ed" verbs.
If you're someone who sometimes forgets to put the ed, check this page for an explanation about why that might be happening to you.
Two other verb tenses that help us keep things clear when we tell stories are the past progressive (see "was bracing" in the excerpt) and the past perfect. They clarify what what was happening when or what happened before something else happened.
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