where

phrasal verb + clause ‘work out how you did it’

At C2 in the English Vocabulary Profile: work out = to understand something or to find the answer to something by thinking about it A search in NOW corpus for which ‘question words’ follow phrasal verbs: work out _*Q 1 WORK OUT HOW 12286 Just give us five minutes, Mr Poirot, and I‘m sure we‘ll be able to work out how you did it. listen 2 WORK OUT WHAT: I […]

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WHAT IS IT YOU WANT? (relative clause question)

Let’s analyse questions that have relative clauses to give emphasis.  So usually, we would say something like: What do we want to ask?  What are we trying to find out here? You can see the normal auxiliary verbs ‘be’ and ‘do’ get removed and relative clauses are added in the EXPERT EXAMPLES: What is it that we want

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WHERE (relative clause)

In the English Grammar Profile, B1 point 78 in the category of CLAUSES is described as: defining relative clauses with ‘where’ to define nouns referring to place. For example: Her laptop computer is on the top of the desk where it is easy for her to reach. PELIC STUDENT: Chinese, Female, Level 3, Writing Class. *One could argue that ‘where’ could refer to a situation and not just a physical place, and

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