5 exercises — practise the invariant concessive correlative "be it X or Y".
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses the fixed subjunctive "be it" to concede that any of two alternatives applies equally?
"...must pass the smoke tests, be it a hotfix or a scheduled release" correctly uses the invariant subjunctive "be it", which never changes for tense or number. Options B and D wrongly conjugate to "is" or "was". Option C redundantly adds "is" after the subjunctive "be".
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "be it" with three parallel alternatives describing types of technical debt?
"...must be tracked, be it code duplication, missing tests, or outdated dependencies" correctly keeps the invariant singular "be it" regardless of the plural list that follows. Option B wrongly uses a gerund. Option C wrongly pluralizes to "be them". Option D substitutes the wrong pronoun "that" instead of "it".
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly places "be it" at the start of a sentence to concede that any cause of an outage must be handled the same way?
"Be it a network partition or a bad deploy, the on-call engineer follows the same incident checklist" correctly opens with the fixed subjunctive concessive. Option B wrongly turns it into a question form. Option C adds an unnecessary "that". Option D wrongly uses a participle, which would describe the engineer rather than concede the cause.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly distinguishes "be it" (concessive, naming alternatives) from a literal imperative use of "be"?
"Be it a staging or a production environment, secrets must never be committed...; be sure to rotate them..." correctly uses the fixed concessive "be it" once, then a separate ordinary imperative "be sure". Option B wrongly repeats "be it" where a plain imperative is needed. Options C and D distort the fixed "be it" phrase itself.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "be it" mid-sentence, set off by commas, to concede that the specific tool used does not matter?
"...a signed artifact, be it a container image or a compiled binary, before it can be promoted..." correctly keeps the invariant subjunctive "be it" parenthetically inserted mid-sentence. Options B, C, and D wrongly conjugate or inflect "be".