Question

I'll help him if he_____. Choose the correct word to fill the gap.
A. ask
B. asked
C. asks
D. will ask

Answer 1

Hint: Any a word that can be used to describe an action, state, or occurrence is a verb. It forms the main part of the predicate of a sentence. In other words, verbs are words that describe ‘work’ like- hear, talk, drink etc. Now that we know what verbs are, let us move on to their different forms.
In different situations, people have to adjust with their surroundings. Similarly, a verb also has to ‘adjust’ itself in different sentences. For example, the only difference between the sentences, ‘I love you’, and ‘I loved you’ is that the speaker (I) loves ‘you’ (to whom it is being spoken) in the former sentence whereas in the latter, the speaker used to love ‘you’ (listener).

Complete answer:
1. Here we are going to check each option one by one so that we can detect the correct option containing the proper form of the verb.
2. We know that the basic principle of subject-verb agreement is that the subject should go along with the verb. So, if the subject doesn’t agree with the verb, then the sentence becomes grammatically incorrect. If we look at the first option, something similar to this can be noticed. The word- ‘ask’ does not go with he (subject) because the latter is singular. Hence, this option is incorrect.
3. While forming sentences, it is very important to keep in mind that we should only use one tense in the whole literature. If more than one tense is used, then the sentence becomes grammatically incorrect. We can see this in option B. This option is not correct because the word ‘asked’ is the past participle of ‘ask’ whereas the verb (I'll help) in the sentence is in simple future tense.
4. Option C, ‘asks’ is the correct answer to this question because it is in complete agreement with the subject.
5. Option D is incorrect.

Hence the correct answer is option ‘C’.

Note:We use verbs to describe any action, state or occurrence taking place or being done by the subject. Some verbs are ‘walk’, ‘talk’, ‘laugh’, ‘see’, ‘cry’, ‘dance’, ‘play’ and so on. Here the present tense is required which can be aligned with the simple future tense. Having a present tense and third person, it gets the ‘s’ at the end of the verb.