B1 English Grammar

B1 grammar exercises

Every lesson marked above also has its own practice set: 18 sets of 60 exercises — 360 multiple-choice questions, 360 fill-in-the-blank and 360 sentence-building tasks in total. Each one is marked as you answer, keeps your score, and works without an account.

What you can do with B1 English

The Common European Framework describes B1 as the level at which a learner can handle the following. Each grammar topic below feeds directly into one or more of them.

• deal with most situations likely to arise while travelling

• produce connected text on familiar or personal topics

• describe experiences, events, dreams and ambitions

• give brief reasons and explanations for opinions and plans

What order to study B1 grammar in

Conditionals repay being learned as a system rather than one type at a time, because their forms only make sense in relation to each other. Reported speech should follow, since it depends on the same backshift mechanism. Leave gerunds and infinitives until later — they are learned through accumulated exposure rather than through a rule, so they benefit from a longer runway.

The mistakes that mark a B1 learner

These five come up more often than everything else combined at this level. None of them stops you being understood, which is precisely why they survive so long — nobody corrects them in conversation.

• ✗ When I arrived, the film already started. ✓ When I arrived, the film had already started.

  Two past events need the past perfect on the earlier one, or the sequence collapses. B1 is where English begins to expect you to mark this layer rather than leaving it to context.

• ✗ He asked me where do I live. ✓ He asked me where I live.

  An embedded question keeps statement word order. The auxiliary do disappears entirely. This is the most common reported-speech error at B1 and a reliable marker of the level.

• ✗ I look forward to meet you. ✓ I look forward to meeting you.

  Some verbs and phrases take the -ing form rather than the infinitive, and look forward to is one of them because the to is a preposition, not part of an infinitive.

• ✗ I suggest you to try again. ✓ I suggest that you try again.

  Suggest and recommend do not take object + to + verb, unlike tell, ask and advise. The patterns differ verb by verb and must be learned individually.

• ✗ Despite of the rain, we went out. ✓ Despite the rain, we went out.

  Despite takes no of; in spite of does. Both are followed by a noun or an -ing form, never by a full clause — for that you need although.

How to know you have really reached B1

B1 is secure when you can order events in a story without thinking about it: past perfect for what happened first, past simple for the main line, past continuous for the background. It is also the level at which phrasal verbs stop being a vocabulary list and start being grammar — you should know without checking whether a given one can be split by its object. A fair self-test is to report a conversation you had this week in writing. If the tenses shift back correctly and the embedded questions keep statement order, you are ready for B2.

B1 English grammar: frequently asked questions