Question

Fill in the blank with the most appropriate option.
A: Are Peter and Mary still sitting in the office?
B: No, __________.
a) They don’t sit
b) They standing
c) There aren’t
d) They aren’t

Answer 1

Hint: A verb is a content word that denotes an action, occurrence, or state of existence. The verb is the word class that serves as the predicate of a sentence.

Complete answer:
In the given question, we have to find out which of the options given to us indicates that presently Peter and Mary are not sitting in the office.
Let us thus analyze the options given to us in this question-
Option (a.), 'they don’t sit', refers to a general rule or assumption that Peter and Mary don’t sit. Therefore, option (a.) is incorrect as the usage of ‘still’ in the first sentence indicates that Peter and Mary were sitting at some point of time and the speaker wants to know if they were sitting at that moment as well.
Option (b.), ‘they standing', refers to a pronoun and an adjective. Therefore, option (b.) is incorrect as the two words need to be joined by a verb in the middle to make the phrase grammatically correct.
Option (c.), ‘there aren’t', refers to ‘there’ which is a demonstrative pronoun. Therefore, option (c.) is incorrect as ‘they’ (personal pronoun) is used to refer to persons.
Option (d.), ‘they aren’t', is correct as it is grammatically correct and also indicates that presently Peter and Mary are not sitting in the office.

Note:
 In this question, it will be helpful for the student to recall the concept of tense. Tense is a grammatical category of verbs used to express distinctions of time. There are three tenses- past, present, and future.