A question about tense
Pet food used to be about selecting a small, medium, or large bag of whatever your local feed or grocery store stocked. Today, choosing pet food from among the hundreds of varieties in the $17 billion United States market can be a complicated task. Beef, duck, vegetables, and salmon are part of today’s pet diets. Once created to profit from human food manufacturing waste, the pet food industry now makes products with human-grade ingredients that sell well because people want something better for their family members who happen to be pets. The number of people purchasing pet food with human-grade ingredients is on the increase. As a result, pets truly do increase the burden on agriculture, because they are no longer eating the “leftover” products.
If I use 'stocks' instead of 'stocked,' is it grammatically wrong?
(supposing that the way that the local feed or grocery store stocks pet food 'has not changed' and that the increase on the varieties has been happening only online.)
hope that you got my point. Thanks for your reply.
Top answer
build book 330 Pet food used to be about selecting a small, medium, or large bag of whatever your local feed or grocery store stocked. I see a real time parallelness between the verb phrases "used to be" and "stocked". Both refer to the past, so it doesn't seem OK to replace "stocked" with "stocks" in that sentence.
- build book 330 Pet food used to be about selecting a small, medium, or large bag of whatever your local feed or grocery store stocked.
- I see a real time parallelness between the verb phrases "used to be" and "stocked".
- Both refer to the past, so it doesn't seem OK to replace "stocked" with "stocks" in that sentence.
Get the Weekly English Kit 📬
New words, one handy idiom, and a 2-minute quiz — delivered to your inbox to keep your streak alive.
build book 330Pet food used to be about selecting a small, medium, or large bag of whatever your local feed or grocery store stocked.
I see a real time parallelness between the verb phrases "used to be" and "stocked". Both refer to the past, so it doesn't seem OK to replace "stocked" with "stocks" in that sentence.
0build book 330hope that you got my point
Yes. Your point is the same one that many, many learners bring up about English tenses nearly every day.
In English you don't have to know anything about the present to make a statement about the past. The fact that sometimes past situations continue to exist in present time is irrelevant to the choice of ten
0
Related Questions