Hey, there! How are you today?

In a previous post, you learned about Simple Present and how to make simple affirmative and negative phrases.

Now that you know how to do this, I want to show how to make questions. Yep! You are ready to learn more about Simple Present. It is important to ask questions. IN this post, you will learn how to make objective questions (yes/ no).  But don’t worry, I will teach you how to ask different questions (what, where, when, etc) Stay tuned!

You already know that we need pronouns, verbs and complements to make sentences in English, right? Now, we need more! To do that in English, we can NOT only use a question mark (?) to indicate it is a question as it is common in many languages. To indicate you are asking a question in English you need “an assistant”. This “assistant” will help you indicate two things: A. it is a question. B it is a question in the simple present.  As you learn more tenses in English, you will see that if you are talking about PAST or Future, you will need a different assistant! This “assistant” is called auxiliary verb. The auxiliary verb is very important, that’s why when you study simple present, we need to show you this! Now, how can we use it? Where is it? Check it out:

A             P             V             C    

Remember the abbreviations I showed you in the previous posts? Yep, you will find this here as well! Now, what do they mean?

A =  AUXILIARY VERB (THE ASSISTANT, REMEMBER?)

P = PRONOUN/PERSON

V = VERB

C = COMPLEMENT

Now, the assistant is one (do), so it is easy to memorize. You will DO.  Many students get confused when they learn this. DO is a verb. Do homework, do exercises, do something, it is an action.  Here in the question, it is not a verb, it is an auxiliary verb. However, you can also use verb DO if you need to. I will show you how.

First, let’s see more examples of questions:

Do you study English?

Do you work downtown?

Do the kids play video games?

Do the dogs like to eat?

Do the cats play outside?

Do your parents like to travel?

Do I speak well?

Do you listen to music every day?

Do you read books in English?

Do you work on weekends?

Do your friends play soccer?

IMPORTANT: DO is only used for the pronouns I, YOU, WE, THEY AND PLURAL OBJECTS, ok? You will learn how to ask questions with HE, SHE, IT and singular objects in another post

Now, let’s see some examples where DO is both auxiliary verb and verb

 Do you do your homework every day?

Do you do exercises?

 

Answering questions

Now that you know how to ask questions, I’m going to show you how to answer them. There are two ways you can do that, well actually as you learn more vocabulary, you will see there many different ways to answer questions, it all depends on vocabulary. But in general, you will answer questions in English like this:

Short answers OR long answers.

Short answers

Do you like apples?  YES, I DO (affirmative) NO, I DON’T (negative)

Do your parents work? YES, THEY DO (affirmative) NO, THEY DON’T (negative)

Long answers

Do you like apples?  YES, I like apples (affirmative). NO, I don’t like apples (negative)

Do your parents work? YES, they work. (affirmative) No, they don’t work (negative)

 

If you read the examples, you will see that, for short answers, you need the word, yes, the pronoun and DO, while for negative answers you need the words no, the pronoun and don’t.

For long answers, you will need to repeat all the phrase like an affirmative phrase. Two important things. 1. Yes/no question? Yes? So Start with a “yes” and after that repeat all the phrase. 2. Don’t use the word “do”. Here you don’t need the assistant anymore. Only use “do” if it is the “action” of the sentence. For example: Do you do your homework every day? Yes, I do my homework every day. Here “do” is a verb too, so you need it for your long answer, ok?

 

Now, how about answering some questions? Give short and long answers!

1. Do you work?

2. Do you study English?

3. Do you like to read?

4. Do you drive a car?

5. Do you play a musical instrument?

6. Do you travel on weekends?

7. Do you and your friends travel together?

 

I hope you like this post. Leave your answers in the comments and share this post with your friends!

 

Thanks!

Teacher Prix