Cover of the textbook New Total English Upper-Intermediate - Students' Book

The key answer of exercise 10

The key to exercise solutions in chapter 5.2 - At your own risk for the textbook New Total English Upper-Intermediate - Students' Book with authors Araminta Crace and Richard Acklam from Pearson Education

Question

  1. Look at the Active grammar box and audioscipt 1.39 on page 167. Say which of the underlined sentences refer to.
  2. Work in pairs. Look at the questions and decide why you might choose can and could for talking about permission in each one.

Answer

a)

  1. You should come with me next time.; If I were you, I'd just go for it.
  2. You should have moved a bit more gently.; You shouldn’t have leaned so far, then.
  3. You could arrive any time after 8:00 in the morning,; You can’t go up alone on your first time.; You can go alone after doing a few flights with an instructor.; Could you do a really low flight? Are you allowed to go up just a little way above the ground?
  4. Were you allowed to just start without doing any training? I couldn’t go straight up without any training at all.; I wasn’t allowed to go up before having some brief general instructions.

b)

Can and Could can both be used to talk about permission in the present in sentence 1 but Could is a little more tentative.