Learn English Fast - How To Speculate (Guess)

Why is she crying? If you don’t know the answer to a ‘why’ question in English, you can speculate (guess) the answer.

Why is Donald so sick? He might have eaten some bad food
Why is the train so late? There could have been an accident

In this video we show you how to guess when you aren’t sure about the answer

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TRANSCRIPT

Why is she crying? we’re going to find out in today’s video as we learn how to speculate.

Let’s learn English!

Hmmm, she doesn NOT look happy! Will here from Antelope Collision helping you learn English fast. Today’s lesson, we’re looking at how to speculate. What is ‘speculate’? Well say that you have a ‘why’ question that you don’t know the answer to. That’s when you speculate. So our question is ‘why is this girl crying?’ Why is she crying? I don’t know? Do you know? Let’s speculate

Let’s look at some reasons. Why do you cry? You cry when a family member dies. You can when you split up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. You cry when someone shouts at you. And you might cry when you fail an exam.

So this lovely girl, why is she crying? Well, we don’t know but we can speculate and we use some modal verbs to speculate. How sure are we? Not very sure. But we can guess. When we make guesses between 80% to 20%. Maybe we’re 80% sure or 20% sure we would use the modal verbs could or might.

So let’s make our first guess. We start with our subject SHE then our MODAL VERB might or could. SHE + MIGHT/COULD fail an exam… This happened in the past so we need to change this part of the sentence. into the PRESENT PERFECT. You might have heard of the present perfect tense before. If you haven’t heard of this before we do have a nice worksheet on our website that you can check out and revise. We’ve got ‘she might fail an exam’ how do we make this PRESENT PERFECT? We are forgetting a word. She might have. We always use HAVE with the PRESENT PERFECT. And then what form of the verb? We need the PAST PARTICLE. So Fail- failed - failed. The past participle is failed. She might have failed an exam. Our first guess; she might have failed an exam.

Let’s make this easy for you, let’s break this down. We have MODAL VERB + HAVE + PAST PARTICPLE. So whenever you have a why question that you don’t know the answer to, this is how you speculate MODAL VERB + HAVE + PAST PARTICPLE. As we might say in this instance. She might have failed an exam

OK, let’s make another guess. Why is she crying. Do you remember this picture? We need our subject. This time the subject is her family member. It could be her friend, her family member might and then have plus participle. Her family member might have died. It’s another guess, another possibility on what might have happened.

Let’s make another speculation and this time, a little bit different.. I know that she doesn’t have a boyfriend So about 0% sure. We change the modal verb. 0%, 1%, 2% we’d use the modal verb ‘can’t. I’m going to change this here to can’t. I know it’s not possible it’s definitely not true. She can’t have, what was our past participle? Split up or Broken up. It’s the same thing. So maybe.. She can’t have broken up up with her boyfriend

Let’s make one more guess. Somebody shouting. I can tell you that as I was walking over I heard somebody shouting. So this time I’m very sure, I’m 95% sure, I am 100% sure this happened. This is why she’s crying. So I’d use the modal verb MUST.

So we can get rid of can’t. And I can change that to must. Can you make this guess at home? What’s the subject? Somebody. Somebody must have shouted at her. We change the modal to MUST. Somebody must have shouted at her.

Wow, that was easy, that’s how we speculate in English. I have one more ‘why’ question for you now, look at this picture.

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My question this time is, Why is this person shouting at the cat? Please leave a comment down below and we’ll correct your English for you. Did you understand this lesson? If you did then head over to our website and take the quiz. If you liked this lesson please make sure you subscribe and we’ll make many more for you. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time!