Question

Which of the following sentences is correct?
A) He has never nor ever will tell a lie.
B) He has never told nor ever will have told a lie.
C) He never tells nor will ever told a lie.
D) He never has told nor ever will tell a lie.

Answer 1

Hint: This question includes concepts of tenses and conjunctions. Tenses tell us when an event occurs (past, present, future) and conjunctions are words that connect two phrases or clauses. While writing a sentence in the simple past and simple present tense, we can directly use the appropriate form of the verb. But while writing in future tense, or in perfect or continuous tense, we need to use an auxiliary verb. For e.g. ‘has’ as given in the question.

Complete answer:
Three of the sentences in the options contain lots of grammatical errors. The most common errors that we might see are errors in tenses, disagreement between subject and verb, improper pronouns, punctuations etc. We must look for that ‘one’ sentence, which does not have any of the above errors.

Let us look into the given options:
Option (A) He has never nor ever will tell a lie – In this sentence, the first half of the sentence seems to be in the present perfect tense, but there is no verb mentioned except for the auxiliary verb ‘has’. Therefore, this sentence is incomplete and hence the option is incorrect.
Option (B) He has never told nor ever will have told a lie – The first half of this sentence is in the present perfect tense and has a verb for reference. The second half of the sentence is in the future perfect tense, but it does not have a correct reference in the future. (Future perfect tense is used when something has to be done in future but before a certain time in future). Thus, this option is wrong.
Option (C) He never tells nor will ever told a lie – The first half of this sentence is in the simple present tense. The second half is an incorrect sentence because it uses the word ‘will’ for the future tense and the word ‘told’ which is a past tense form of the verb. Hence, this option is also wrong.
Option (D) He never has told nor ever will tell a lie. The first half of this sentence is in the present perfect tense, and the second half of the sentence is simple future tense. The sentence is saying that ‘he has never done something till present and will ever do it in future’. This sentence makes sense and hence it is the correct option.

Thus, the correct answer is Option (D) i.e, He never has told nor ever will tell a lie.

Note:
- Verbs are used in many different tenses. The common ones are simple past, simple present and simple future.
- Other tenses are perfect tense, continuous tense and perfect continuous tense.
- The perfect continuous tense combines the perfect and the continuous tenses. It uses the word ‘been’ before the verb and shows the continuity of an action being done.