5 exercises — verbs that take gerunds, verbs that take infinitives, dual-use verbs, purpose clauses, and prepositional contexts.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Choose the correct form: "The team decided _____ the monolith into microservices."
"Decide" takes an infinitive: "decided to break." Verbs expressing decisions, intentions, or plans (decide, plan, want, need, choose) are followed by "to + verb".
2 / 5
Which is correct? "We recommend _____ the cache before running migrations."
"Recommend" takes a gerund: "recommend clearing." Other verbs in this group: suggest, avoid, consider, practise, risk, enjoy. Note: "recommend that you clear" is also correct but uses a that-clause, not an infinitive directly.
3 / 5
Complete: "The service is responsible _____ all incoming webhook events."
After a preposition, use a gerund. "Responsible for" is a fixed prepositional phrase, so it must be followed by "-ing": "responsible for handling." Other examples: "benefit from caching", "in charge of deploying".
4 / 5
Choose the correct purpose clause: "We use a CDN _____ latency for global users."
Infinitives of purpose ("to reduce") answer "why" or "in order to." They express the purpose or goal of an action. "For + gerund" is possible but less common in formal technical writing for purpose clauses.
5 / 5
Which sentence is grammatically correct?
"Consider" takes a gerund: "consider splitting." "Avoid" also takes a gerund ("avoid deploying"), not an infinitive. "Stop + gerund" means cease the action; "stop + infinitive" means pause to do something else — both are valid but with different meanings.