Question

Choose the correct form of the verb to complete the sentence.
Smita ____ English for seven years now.
a- have been teaching
b- had been teaching
c- taught
d- has been teaching

Answer 1

Hint: We use the present perfect continuous tense to indicate an action that began in the past and is continuing in the present. Also, the Subject-verb agreement must accord in number. Either both the subject and verb should be singular or both should be plural in number.

Complete answer:
 As given in the hint, we need to maintain the subject-verb agreement relationship in the above-given sentence.
For example- She has a beautiful face. Here, we have used the third person singular verb ‘have’ with the third person singular pronoun ‘she’, to form subject-verb agreement.
In the given question- We can conclude that Smita has been teaching English for seven years now. Here, we have used the third person singular verb ‘has’ with the singular noun ‘Smita’.
Now, let’s examine the given options-
Option a- ‘have been teaching’ is an incorrect option because ‘have’ is a third-person plural verb that is used with plural nouns and pronouns.
Option b- ‘had been teaching’ is an incorrect option because the use of the word ‘now’ suggests that the action is continuing. Hence, we cannot use the past tense form with it.
Option c- ‘taught’ is an incorrect option because it is the past tense form of the verb ‘teach’. Since the sentence is given in the context of the present tense, we cannot use the past tense.
Option d- ‘has been teaching’ is the correct option because we use the third person singular verb ‘has’ with singular pronouns and nouns. The correct answer is Option ‘d’.

Note:
The structure of present perfect continuous tense is; Subject + has/have + been + ing form of the verb + object. For example- She has been singing here for ten years.