Activity: Verb Tenses

Another consistency issue is regarding tense consistency. Read the following section and get some practice by doing the activity. When you are done, compare your responses to the answer key.

Correcting for Verb Tense Consistency Activity

Read the following groups of sentences to find the verb/s that are not consistent with the tense of the action taking place. After you find the verb/s, rewrite the sentence correcting the inconsistency.

  1. The overturned truck, smashed cars, and emergency vehicles stopped traffic on one side of the interstate.  On the other side, drivers slow down to look at what had happened.
  2. In the movie, the rock monsters fought one another smashing everything in sight. When the hero tries to stop them, they tossed him aside like a rag doll.    
  3.  When Martin was filing his taxes, he stumbled on a rebate program he had missed in prior years.  He fills out the application for it, and then sent it.
  4. The bobolink, a type of grassland songbird, travels over five thousand miles to migrate to South America every year. Sometimes it took breaks in its trip, but it completes this journey in under two months.
  5. Barack Obama was a community activist and then an Illinois senator. He becomes the 44th president in 2009 and served two terms.