Hello!
This video is about 'impossible conditionals'. "If I had waited", for example or this one:
"If the cyclist hadn't...", but he did. But the good thing was that Jake met Antonia as
a result.
I hope you enjoy the story.
We're looking at Jake's adventures this morning. And here's a picture of Jake when he was crossing
the road, there he is. He was crossing the road on the zebra crossing when a cyclist
came whizzing along a bit too fast. And, I'll just write above here "the cyclist hit Jake
on the zebra crossing". I'll just write "on the crossing". "The cyclist hit Jake on the
crossing".
Now that wasn't inevitable and if the cyclist, I'll write down here "if the cyclist had slowed
down, it wouldn't have happened". "If the cyclist had slowed down, he wouldn't have
hit Jake". And that's the form of the third type conditional "if" followed by "had slowed"
(a past perfect) then in the other half of the sentence "wouldn't have hit", "wouldn't
have done" et cetera.
Right, let's move on and he gets into an ambulance, there's the bell of the ambulance, ringing
away there (sorry about my drawing) and he arrives in hospital. There he is in his hospital
bed being looked after by the nurse.
And I'll just write at the top here "Jake met Antonia in hospital". And again we can
write an impossible condition, 'if he hadn't gone'. So I'll just write underneath here
"if Jake hadn't gone to hospital (if Jake hadn't gone to hospital), he wouldn't have
met Antonia". So again, as before, we've got "if" followed by "hadn't gone" (past perfect)
and in the other half of the sentence "wouldn't have met".
Now this last thing, we've got our friend Polly and Polly is saying "I would've if I
could've". Notice the contractions - "I would've if I could've". But she didn't because she
couldn't. And here's a little chart just to explain it in a rather different sort of way.
So we've got "would have" in the main clause, "I'd have spoken" or "would have spoken"
and "if" plus a past perfect in the "if clause". "If I'd seen her", "If I had seen her". And
remember that you can put the two clauses in either order, doesn't matter which one
you put first.
So that's video number three of the three types of conditional but a couple of people
have written to me, and I really appreciate this, saying that they would like more clarification
on the way we mix up the different conditions. So I would like to do to that in my next video.
But in the mean time I'm just going to rub all this out and have a little test.