Preposition + Gerund Patterns in Technical English
5 exercises — practise using the gerund form after prepositions.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly completes: "The on-call engineer is responsible for _____ the incident within fifteen minutes."
"...responsible for acknowledging the incident..." is correct: after a preposition (here, "for"), English always requires a gerund, never a to-infinitive or bare base form. Option A incorrectly uses a to-infinitive, a common error since "responsible to acknowledge" sounds plausible but is ungrammatical; the preposition "for" demands "-ing". Option B uses the bare base form, which cannot follow a preposition. Option D uses the past participle, which would require a passive auxiliary ("for the incident being acknowledged") to work grammatically.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly completes: "Instead of _____ the whole service, we rolled back the single faulty pod."
"Instead of restarting the whole service..." is correct: "instead of" is a preposition, so it must be followed by a gerund. Option A uses the bare base form, which is ungrammatical after a preposition. Option B incorrectly uses a to-infinitive; prepositions never take to-infinitives. Option D uses the past participle, which does not fit this slot without an auxiliary structure.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly completes: "The team is interested in _____ the API before the next major version."
"...interested in deprecating the API..." is correct: the preposition "in" must be followed by a gerund. Option B incorrectly uses a to-infinitive, a frequent mistake because many similar adjective + infinitive patterns exist (e.g., "eager to deprecate"), but "interested in" specifically pairs an adjective with a preposition, which forces the gerund. Option C uses the bare base form, which cannot follow a preposition. Option D uses the past participle, which would need to be restructured as a passive gerund ("being deprecated") to be grammatical.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly completes: "Prior to _____ the migration script, back up the production database."
"Prior to running the migration script..." is correct: "prior to" functions as a compound preposition, and like all prepositions, it must be followed by a gerund. Option A uses the bare base form, which is ungrammatical here. Option C incorrectly adds "to" a second time in a to-infinitive form; note that "prior to" already contains "to" as part of the preposition itself, so "running" alone (not "to run") must follow it. Option D uses the past tense, which cannot function as a complement immediately after a preposition.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly completes: "The dashboard is used for _____ latency across all regions in real time."
"...used for monitoring latency across all regions..." is correct: the preposition "for" must be followed by a gerund when describing the purpose or function of a tool. Option A uses the bare base form, which is ungrammatical after a preposition. Option B incorrectly uses a to-infinitive; while "used to monitor" is grammatical as a separate purpose construction, it changes the sentence structure and does not fit after the preposition "for" as written. Option C uses the past participle, which would require additional auxiliary structure to function correctly.