Conditional Alternatives to 'If' in Technical English
5 exercises — practise "unless", "provided that", and "as long as" in technical specifications.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "unless" to state an exception in an SLA?
"We will not issue a refund unless the outage exceeds the agreed threshold" is correct: "unless" already means "if not", so it is followed by an affirmative clause in the present simple (for future/general conditions). Option A double-negates by adding "doesn't" after "unless", reversing the intended meaning. Option C incorrectly combines "unless" with "if", which is redundant and non-standard. Option D incorrectly uses "will exceed" in the unless-clause; like "if"-clauses, "unless"-clauses use the present simple to refer to future conditions.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "provided that" to state a condition for a deployment to proceed?
"We can deploy to production, provided that all integration tests pass" is correct: "provided that", like "if", takes the present simple to describe a required future condition. Option B incorrectly uses "will pass" in the condition clause. Option C uses "provided" without "that" (which is grammatically acceptable) but incorrectly uses the past simple "passed" instead of the present simple for a still-pending condition. Option D is ungrammatical, awkwardly stacking two verb forms.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "as long as" to state an ongoing condition for a service guarantee?
"The API remains free to use as long as your request volume stays under 10,000 calls per month" is correct: "as long as" introduces an ongoing condition and, like other conditional connectors, takes the present simple for a general or future-continuing condition. Option B incorrectly uses "will stay". Option C incorrectly uses "as long that" instead of the fixed phrase "as long as". Option D incorrectly uses the past simple "stayed", which misrepresents the condition as already completed rather than ongoing.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "unless" in a technical specification describing a fallback behavior?
Both A and B are grammatically correct and mean the same thing: "unless X" and "if not X" are interchangeable in most conditional contexts, and both sentences correctly use the present simple after the conditional connector. This tests recognizing that "unless" is fundamentally a contraction of "if...not", so a well-formed "unless" clause and its "if not" paraphrase should both be accepted as correct, unlike option D, which incorrectly uses the future "will receive" inside the unless-clause.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "providing (that)" to state a precondition for granting production access?
"Engineers get production access providing they have completed the security training" is correct: "providing (that)" functions exactly like "provided that", introducing a precondition, and here the present perfect "have completed" correctly expresses a requirement that must already be satisfied. Option B incorrectly uses "will complete", a future form not used in this precondition clause. Option C misspells the connector as "provide" instead of "providing". Option D incorrectly inserts "for" after "providing", which is not part of the fixed expression.