5 exercises — choose the correct verb form after technical verbs like consider, decide, fail, recommend, and try.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The team decided ___ the deployment after discovering a critical bug in the payment module.
"Decide" is followed by an infinitive (to + verb). Other verbs that take infinitives include: agree, fail, manage, attempt, need, plan, refuse, and want. Compare with gerund verbs: "The team avoided rolling back by fixing the bug in place." Understanding which verbs take infinitives vs gerunds eliminates one of the most common non-native speaker errors in technical communication.
2 / 5
Have you considered ___ the database schema before migrating to the new ORM?
"Consider" always takes a gerund (verb + -ing), never an infinitive. The same applies to: avoid, recommend, suggest, finish, keep, practise, risk, and mind. "Consider to normalise" is a very common error for non-native English speakers. The gerund form "normalising" correctly follows "considered" here.
3 / 5
We tried ___ the container with more memory, but the OOM errors persisted.
"Try + gerund" means to experiment or attempt something as a solution: "We tried running the container with more memory" = we experimented with this approach. "Try + infinitive" means to make an effort or attempt: "We tried to run the container but it kept crashing" = we attempted but perhaps failed. In IT troubleshooting contexts, "try running X" (gerund) is the standard formulation for testing a solution.
4 / 5
The CI pipeline failed ___ the integration tests due to a missing environment variable.
"Fail + infinitive" describes not succeeding at an action: "failed to run the tests" = did not succeed in running them. This is the standard pattern in technical incident reports and deployment logs: "the service failed to start," "the query failed to return results," "the build failed to compile." "Failed running" would be ungrammatical in this context.
5 / 5
The documentation recommends ___ feature flags before ___ any major infrastructure changes.
"Recommend" always takes a gerund: "recommends enabling." The second slot requires "making" because it follows the preposition "before" — prepositions in English are always followed by gerunds, never infinitives (before making, after deploying, by running, without testing). Both slots require gerunds for different grammatical reasons: the first because of "recommend," the second because of the preposition "before."