CONDITIONALS
CONDITIONALS Conditional tenses are used to speculate about what could happen, what might have happened, and what we wish would happen. In English, most sentences using the conditional contain the word if . Many conditional forms in English are used in sentences that include verbs in one of the past tenses. This usage is referred to as "the unreal past" because we use a past tense but we are not actually referring to something that happened in the past. There are five main ways of constructing conditional sentences in English. In all cases, these sentences are made up of an if clause and a main clause. In many negative conditional sentences, there is an equivalent sentence construction using "unless" instead of "if". Use table Conditional sentence type Usage If clause verb tense Main clause verb tense Zero General truths Simple present Simple present Type 1 A possible condition and its probable result Simple present Simp