english for tesol

Question

How long the storm lasted?

What is wrong in this sentence?

Explanation?

Answer 1

What's wrong with this sentence is that it is missing a question word or helping verb within it. Some question words that are frequently used are "what", "do", and "why" to help start us off. A few helping verbs that are also frequent are "is", "be", "are", and "has". These words are important to know because they allow us to create questions from statements by just adding one or two words.

In the sentence "How long the storm lasted?", we need to add is the helping word "has" to make it a natural question. Now, where we put the word is a little tricky and we may need to get into the nitty-gritty of it all, but to simply give the answer, you put it after the adjective 'long'.

The correct way to ask this question is "How long has the storm lasted?".

While there are other ways to use different question words or helping words here, making use of the sentence you provided and not changing anything other than adding in a new word, the word "has" is the appropriate word to use.

Answer 2

Correct: How long did the storm last? or How long has the storm lasted?

Lasted (in this context) is called a past participle - thats a form of a verb that corresponds to past tense. Typically you wont use "lasted" in a question - but as a response to a question.

Has is called a helping verb. Helping verbs can be used in conjunction with past participles like is jumping, has lasted, was rising, etc. This can allow us to use those pesky past participles in the forms of questions!

Examples:

How high was the sea rising?

How far is the man jumping?



It can also be used in this matter, (though not as preferred):

The storm lasted how long?

The war lasted how long?

The test lasted how long?