Parts of the following sentence have been given as options. Select the option that contains an error. I have sing ‘Let It Go’ before a crowd of thousands of people.

Correct — C. The auxiliary in that segment is have, which makes the tense present perfect, and present perfect is built with the past participle — never with the bare base form of the verb.

Sing runs sing – sang – sung, so the segment has to read I have sung.

That puts the fault in option (c). The other three parts are ordinary English exactly as printed.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  thousands of people — thousands of people is a normal indefinite quantifier: thousand takes the plural -s when no exact number precedes it and is then followed by of. Nothing here needs changing.
• (b)
  a crowd of — a crowd of is the standard partitive before a plural noun, and the singular article a correctly matches the singular noun crowd.
• (d)
  ‘Let It Go’ before — before is used here as a preposition meaning in front of an audience, which is idiomatic, and the song title is simply the object of the verb. No error in this part.

A spot-the-error item hands you one sentence cut into four labelled parts and asks which part is ungrammatical. The quickest route is to find the finite verb and test it first, because that is where the fault usually sits.

Present perfect is have/has + past participle. The trap is set with irregular verbs whose simple past and past participle differ: sing – sang – sung, drink – drank – drunk, ring – rang – rung, begin – began – begun.

Judge the part exactly as printed. You are marking the segment given, not the sentence you would have written.

Key facts

• Present perfect is formed with have or has plus the past participle: I have sung, she has written.
• Sing inflects as sing (base), sang (simple past), sung (past participle).
• I sang is correct standing alone, but after have the verb must appear as sung.

Common traps

• Silently correcting the sentence in your head, then marking a part that was never wrong
• Assuming the longest or the most unusual-looking part must carry the error
• Rejecting thousands of people because the plural feels odd, when the quantifier is standard

No directly related past PYQ was found.