30 English Grammar Demystifi ed
Written Practice 2-3
Circle all the nouns in the following sentences.
- Psychologists now believe that people who get what they want are not
necessarily as happy as they thought they would be. - Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, thinks that in the future we’ll
wonder why we made today’s choices. - We may make perfectly good choices for ourselves today, but we don’t
know who we’ll be in the future. - Credit cards are a great convenience until we overspend!
- Check your credit at least once a year.
- A lawyer testifi ed on that case.
- A renowned designer of glass is Dale Chihuly.
- Carpet covered the entire space.
- Environmentalists in our area planted clams in local ponds and had great
success. - Lawmakers held hearings on the growing defi cit.
Verbs
As you learned in Chapter 1, sentences are complete only if they contain both a
subject and a verb. The verb is part of the backbone of any sentence, joining the
noun or subject as one of two absolutely necessary elements of a complete sentence.
The verb lives in what grammarians call the predicate, which contains the verb plus
all the words that relate specifi cally to it. The verb gives the subject its action or
expresses its state of being.
The doctor suggested that I take much more calcium.The doctor is a believer in vitamin therapy.In the fi rst sentence, the subject is doctor and the verb or action is suggested. In the
second sentence there is no action verb; rather, there is the linking or being verb is.
Many prefer to call is a linking verb because that is what it does—it links a word in