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David, appreciate your further explanation. The quoted sentence with the tense " have been " in my original post is all what I have in my textbook, at which I felt very awkward at first. To catch up with "something that has been true of bachelors in history.", if I rephrase it as "penal laws and customs in many cultures that have been characteristics of bachelors in history, and the ' have been ' denotes events that happened in the past and still have their impact or some connection to the...Read More...

Hi, David, you provided me the best solutions. Appreciate!Read More...

Hello, Ahmed Imam Attia—The sentence is rather awkward with either answer. Where does this sentence come from? Are you quoting a test question or a homework problem, or is the sentence one that you made up yourself? Here is a natural sentence: " I have enough money to buy the books I need ."Read More...

Hi, Muhammadbakr—Thanks for revising your question and title as I asked you to. You have chosen the correct answer, and for the correct reason. Good job! An expository text on blenders would be of a different nature. One could have an expository essay comparing and contrasting blenders in Egypt and the U.S.Read More...

Hi, vegnlove—Your sentence doesn't work. "Doing" should be changed to "do": I have a lot of things to do at the moment. In "things to do," "to do" is a nonfinite relative clause in which "things" functions as the direct object of "do." If you wish to use a present participial modifier of "things," it will be necessary to choose a verb of which "things" can be subject: I have a lot of things requiring my attention at the moment.Read More...

Hi, Andrew, Copulative verbs followed by past participles can indeed be interpreted as an action in the passive or as a state verb followed by an adjective, e.g. The window was broken. In the sentence above, the rules of parallelism indicate that, if "be invalid" is a state verb followed by an adjective, so is "(be) regulated."Read More...

Thank you so much!Read More...

Hello, deepcosmos—If you don't mind, I would appreciate it if you would start a thread of your own. Using the same example or a fresh example, make it very clear exactly what your questions are concerning the sentence(s). Thank you.Read More...

Hello, Muhammadbakr, and welcome to the Grammar Exchange. Please have a look at our Guidelines . If you request an answer to a homework problem, you need to tell us what you think the answer is. Also, please do not titles like "Which is correct?" The rest of the title you have used is fine. Which answer do you think is correct, and why?Read More...

Hi, duaieken—I agree with Ahmed about both of the sentences. Regarding the second, "own" is a verb that basically never occurs in the progressive tenses, except when it signifies something other than mere possession, as in the idiom "own up to": "He has been owning up to his mistakes."Read More...

Hi, Andrew—In each case, there is not necessarily one or more than one thing or person involved. Either interpretation is possible. If one has an orchestra-conducting housemate , for example, it could be that one's housemate conducts one orchestra, or that he conducts more than one orchestra.Read More...

Dear Mr. Gustavo, Thank you so much for your kind reply! I understood that the present tense is appropriate in this sentence. If the sentence involves the adverb which means the past, is it grammatical? For example, I think that the sentence such as "I am thinking about the story which I read earlier" is grammatical. If so, is the following sentence grammatical? You can sometimes make friends with even with total strangers simply because you read the same book as they did before . MikaRead More...

Dear Mr. Gustavo, Thank you so much for your kind message! It is so helpful for me to clear up the problem. MikaRead More...

ThanksRead More...

Hello, Grumio, and welcome to the Grammar Exchange. Those are transitive verbs that require an object. The referent of the object "it" is to be found in the context.Read More...

Hi, Andrew, I agree with you that, for "the strongest criticism" to have a referent, you need to add "of it." Alternatively, since there is no agent that can be replaced with "it," the determiner "its" would also be valid in my opinion: (3) Regarding Knight, it seems like he was trying to defend the human-rental system against what he considered its strongest criticism.Read More...

Well, there it seems to me that it was the person's attitude when turning off the light that bothered the speaker. One thing is clear, at least in the sentences provided: "in a way that" introduces a relative clause with a resultative meaning.Read More...

Thank you so much for you reply. Even though I have many grammar books that I can consult with, it's often hard to get the exact information that I want to know from them.Read More...

Thanks! That makes sense!Read More...

Thanks! I appreciate the help on this!Read More...

Hi, Nada, and welcome to the Grammar Exchange, The comparative adjective of the compound adjective 'well-known' could be either 'better-known' or 'more well-known', so c) a & b is the correct answer.Read More...