5 exercises — practise expressing wishes and regrets with "wish" and "if only" in retrospectives.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly expresses a present wish about a limitation in the current system?
"I wish the API supported pagination" is correct: to express a wish about a present, unreal situation, "wish" is followed by the past simple, even though the meaning is present ("it doesn't support pagination now, and I regret that"). Option A uses the present simple "supports", which is not how unreal present wishes are formed after "wish". Option C uses "will support", a future form that "wish" does not take for present-time complaints. Option D uses the present continuous "is supporting", which is also incorrect after "wish" for a stative, ongoing limitation.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly expresses regret about a past decision in a postmortem, using "if only"?
"If only we had tested the migration script on staging first" is correct: regret about a past action (or failure to act) uses "if only" + past perfect, mirroring the third conditional. Option A uses the past simple, which expresses a present wish, not regret about a completed past event. Option C uses "would test", which is used for complaints about repeated behavior, not a single completed past mistake. Option D uses the present simple, which does not express regret about the past at all.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "wish...would" to express annoyance at a colleague's repeated, ongoing behavior?
"I wish he would stop merging unreviewed pull requests" is correct: "wish...would" expresses irritation at another person's repeated or willful action that the speaker wants to change, and is not used for the speaker's own actions or for stative verbs. Option A uses the past simple, which would suggest a hypothetical single state rather than a request for changed behavior. Option C uses the present simple, which is ungrammatical after "wish" in this sense. Option D uses "will", which "wish" never takes.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly expresses a wish about one's own current skill level, a stative situation?
"I wish I understood distributed consensus algorithms better" is correct: for a present wish about one's own state or ability, "wish" takes the past simple of a stative verb like "understand", not "would". Option A incorrectly uses "would", which is reserved for wishing that someone else's (typically willful, non-stative) behavior would change, not one's own understanding. Option C uses the present simple, which is not the form "wish" requires. Option D incorrectly uses "will".
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "if only" to express a strong, present-tense hypothetical wish about system architecture?
"If only the monolith were easier to split into services" is correct in formal technical register: for present unreal wishes, especially with "be", the subjunctive "were" is preferred over "was" (though "was" is common informally, "were" is the standard, safer choice in written technical English). Option A uses the present simple, which fails to mark the wish as unreal. Option B uses "was", which is acceptable informally but less precise than the subjunctive "were" expected in formal documentation. Option D uses "will be", a future form that "if only" does not take for a present hypothetical.