Question

After reading the given situation, complete with an appropriate question tag;
Your friend’s hair is much shorter than when you last met.
What do you say to her/him?
‘You’ve had your hair cut, ________________?’
(A) hadn’t you?
(B) haven’t you?
(C) have you?
(D) don’t you?

Answer 1

Hint: We can see from the question that there are two parts for the given statement. Till before the comma there is an affirmative statement which means a statement with no negation or ‘not’ part. After the comma we see a part which is a question. So now in order to decide what kind of a question should be asked, we make use of question tags here. By the format of question tags, since the first part is in affirmative the question part will be of a negative form with the same auxiliary verb with no change in tense.

Complete answer:
Read the given statement, and from there we know that the main sentence or first part is in the affirmative form. Things to be noted are:
The auxiliary verb used here is; ‘have’. Do not get confused between ‘have’ and ‘had’ here, ‘have’ is auxiliary and ‘had’ is the verb. So this must become negative in order to make it a question tag. The subject must remain the same. For question tags, we just need to invert the subject and verb.

Now let us look into the given options:
A) Option (A) hadn’t you?; this is incorrect since the auxiliary is ‘have’ and ‘had’ is the verb, so we need to use the negative of ‘have’ in the tag.
B) Option (B) haven’t you?; this is correct, as here ‘have’ is the auxiliary and it is negated correctly. The tag contains an inversion of the same subject and verb with the negation so it is the right answer.
C) Option (C) have you?; this is incorrect, although the auxiliary used is correct, we know that the tag must be negative so this is eliminated.
D)Option (D) don’t you?; this is incorrect since we do not have the verb ‘don’t’ here, and we already have an auxiliary that is ‘have’. So this is automatically omitted.
Therefore the final answer is ‘You’ve had your hair cut, haven’t you?’ and the right tag is in option (B) haven’t you?.

Hence the correct answer is option ‘B’.

Note: Some of the things we must keep in mind while using question tags are given as follows:
- This is a generalized rule that; if the first part of the sentence (till before the comma) is in affirmative then the question tag must be negative. But if the first part is in negative then the question tag must be of the affirmative form. Eg; You are going out, aren’t you? OR You are not going out, are you?

- The auxiliary verb that is used in the first part of the sentence (what precedes the comma), the same verb must be used in the question tag. If in case, no auxiliary verbs are used in the first part then we can make use of ‘do’ for the question tag.
Eg; You stay alone, don’t you?