Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

1. As the delegates were making their way into the conference hall, a power failure ---- the entire building into darkness for almost twenty minutes.

Present Perfect Tense & Present Perfect Continuous Tense

2. Professor Demirsoy ---- the current director of the institute since the two of them were graduate students in Vienna, which is why her recommendation carries so much weight in the department.

Types of Pronouns

3. The geologist ---- team first mapped the fault line running beneath the eastern districts of the city has since been asked to advise the national earthquake commission.

Tense Agreement in Time Clauses

4. Since the regional seed bank was established in 2009, the number of locally adapted crop varieties available to smallholder farmers ---- steadily.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

5. Although the two beetle species ---- virtually identical to the naked eye, taxonomists ---- perfectly well that they belong to entirely different genera.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

6. While the committee was still debating the wording of the final paragraph, one of the observers quietly ---- the room and never returned.

Modals Verbs of Ability & Possibility

7. Since the space telescope began operating in 2022, astronomers ---- observe galaxies that formed less than three hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Present Perfect Tense & Present Perfect Continuous Tense

8. Although the volcano ---- ash continuously for the past six weeks, the monitoring team ---- no significant change in the underground pressure readings so far.

Modals Verbs of Ability & Possibility

9. With her publication record and her fluency in three languages, Dr. Aydın ---- the international research grant without much difficulty, but she chose to remain in the private sector and never even applied.

Future Tenses

10. There is no need to book a taxi for tomorrow morning: the shuttle bus to the conference centre ____ from the hotel entrance at a quarter past eight every day of the congress.

Modals Verbs of Obligation, Necessity & Prohibition

11. Before digital archives became widely available, doctoral students ---- to distant libraries and copy rare manuscripts by hand, a process that could easily consume an entire summer.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

12. Nowadays even the most cautious geologists ---- the theory of plate tectonics to be beyond serious dispute, although the idea was dismissed as fantasy for the best part of half a century.

Modals Verbs of Obligation, Necessity & Prohibition

13. Under the laboratory's safety protocol, visitors ---- the culture plates under any circumstances; the document treats this as an absolute prohibition rather than a mere expectation, since even momentary contact can ruin months of work.

Tense Agreement in Time Clauses

14. The moment the last of the archived field recordings ----, the linguists will begin comparing the dialects spoken on either side of the mountain range.

Types of Pronouns

15. During the first year of the joint project the two laboratories were extremely reluctant to share unpublished data with ----, since each of them feared that the other would claim priority for the discovery.

Types of Pronouns

16. The dean was so dissatisfied with the wording of the final paragraph that she rewrote it ---- instead of returning the whole document to the drafting committee for a third time.

Tense Agreement in Time Clauses

17. By the time the orbiting telescope becomes fully operational at the end of this decade, the engineering team ---- more than fifteen years to the design and calibration of its primary mirror.

Modals Verbs of Ability & Possibility

18. The fossil's teeth show no trace of wear and its limb bones are unusually slender, and since that combination occurs at no other stage of growth, the only possible conclusion is that the animal ---- a juvenile when it died.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

19. ---- the ferry was approaching the harbour, a dense fog ---- so quickly that the captain had to drop anchor offshore and wait until dawn.

Modals Verbs of Obligation, Necessity & Prohibition

20. Since the journal moved to an entirely digital submission system, contributors ---- printed copies of their manuscripts; nothing in the guidelines forbids or even discourages the practice, and a number of senior scholars still post them out of sheer habit.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

21. I must ask to be left off the programme for Friday morning, as I ---- a delegation of visiting scholars around the excavation trenches at ten, and the arrangement was made weeks ago.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

22. The photograph captures a single instant in the summer of 1962: children ---- in the square, vendors were shouting their prices, and a tram was crawling past the fountain.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

23. At the exact moment when the tsunami warning finally ---- the coastal resorts, hundreds of tourists ---- on beaches that would be under water within the hour.

Future Tenses

24. By the time the new desalination plant becomes fully operational in 2040, the region ____ nearly a third of the groundwater reserves it had at the beginning of the century.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

25. As soon as the preliminary results of the trial were announced, the share price of the biotechnology firm ---- sharply, surprising even the most cautious analysts on the exchange.

Modals Verbs of Obligation, Necessity & Prohibition

26. Because her supervisor had already obtained ethical approval covering the whole project, Deniz ---- a separate application for her own sub-study, which spared her several weeks of tedious paperwork.

Future Tenses

27. The ethics board has assured the research team that the funding for the marine sampling project will be transferred to the university account as soon as the final risk assessment ____ by the two independent reviewers.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

28. The materials science laboratory ---- an electron microscope so sophisticated that researchers from three neighbouring universities regularly book time on it.

Types of Pronouns

29. The reading habits of adolescents who have grown up with smartphones differ in almost every measurable respect from ---- of the generation that reached adulthood before the internet became widely available.

Future Tenses

30. - The projector in the seminar room has stopped working again, and the guest lecture is due to start in ten minutes.
- Don't panic. I ____ the technical office right now and ask them to send someone up immediately.

Future Tenses

31. The two delegations ____ the trade agreement in front of the cameras when a last-minute objection raised by one of the observers brought the whole ceremony to a halt.

Tense Agreement in Time Clauses

32. ---- had the newly built bridge been opened to traffic ---- inspectors detected worrying cracks in one of its main support columns.

Past Simple Tense & Past Continuous Tense

33. When the committee finally ---- the funding proposal, the researchers immediately began recruiting participants for the longitudinal study.

Types of Pronouns

34. The two anonymous referees to ---- the manuscript had been sent in the first round both recommended outright rejection, yet the editor chose to invite a substantially revised version.

Present Perfect Tense & Present Perfect Continuous Tense

35. The manuscript on display in the second hall is the oldest complete copy of the epic that ---- to the public anywhere in Europe.

Modals Verbs of Ability & Possibility

36. Although the expedition had been pinned down by the blizzard for almost two days, the rescue helicopter ---- the base camp shortly before nightfall on Thursday.

Modals Verbs of Ability & Possibility

37. The dispatches were being delivered to an abandoned consulate throughout that autumn, so the ambassador ---- what his government had decided; not a single one of the papers ever reached his desk.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

38. Normally a field ecologist who spends her summers deep in the Amazon basin, Dr. Alvarez ---- almost all of her working hours in the laboratory at the moment, since seasonal flooding has made the study site impossible to reach.

Present Perfect Tense & Present Perfect Continuous Tense

39. Since the laboratory ---- the automated sequencing protocol in 2019, the number of samples it can process in a single working day ---- more than fourfold.

Simple Present & Present Continuous Tense

40. Although the museum's newly opened east wing ---- more than three thousand artefacts from the late Bronze Age, no more than a tenth of them can be put on display at any one time.