• Choose a verb phrase for each blank. Decide what time and aspect you think is best. (A few have been done for you.) Note the subject of each verb. Is there any reason to choose a time that is different from the main time frame of the section? If you choose a perfect or progressive verb, can you explain why?
• Notice when the main time frame changes.
• When you have finished the article, look at the verbs you have written: What "aspect" have you used most? (simple? progressive? perfect?) How often does the main time frame switch from one time to another? Is there a clear signal to the reader? How often are there individual verbs that have a different time from the others, even if the main time frame has not changed?

To compare your answers with the original when you are finished, click here. (A new browser window will open with this document, so you can have both windows open and adjust them so that part of each is always visible, and you can easily move back and forth between them.)

Of course, in many cases more than one verb tense would be possible. If your answer differs from the author's, can you see why he chose the one he did? Are you sure yours would also be possible? Would there be any difference in meaning?

Scott Baldauf, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BOSTON Sept. 13, 1996

If you have ever groused about who should be wearing the Miss America sash and tiara, this could be your year to set things straight. Tomorrow, viewers will have their first chance to cast votes for their favorite contestants, when the pageant is televised live from the Convention Center in Atlantic City, N.J. Pageant officials tout the call-in system as a way to take viewers "out of their armchairs" and put them "into the judges' box."

"The American public a strong interest - practically an ownership interest - in the Miss America competition," says Leonard Horn, chief executive of the Miss America Organization in Atlantic City, N.J. "Our pageant a lot more relevant at a time when there not too many positive role models for young women."

But the effort to bring democracy to America's oldest beauty contest an age-old controversy over whether such pageants appropriate for modern times. Some women this year's call-in is a desperate bid by an industry that its influence begin to wane.

"The ways in which Miss America women to seem rather dated compared with the way that Hollywood women," says Katha Pollitt, a writer for the left-leaning Nation magazine in New York. "It's so old-fashioned. I mean, they clothes."

Even though it the world's largest female scholarship program, the Miss America Organization difficulty attracting contestants, she adds. "There a model now of women becoming professionals, of being valued for their achievements and not just for being pretty."

But some social observers pageants popular, even throughout the rise of feminism, and they are an essential part of human culture.

Western history with a beauty contest, when the goddess Aphrodite a Trojan prince the most beautiful woman in the world, Camille Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. "The woman, Helen of Troy, to be married to someone else at the time, a Greek general, and that to a war and tragedy, but also us the Illiad and the Odyssey and the advent of Western literature. And a beauty contest it all."

"If there's one thing I ," she adds, "it's when Miss America in a PC [politically correct] direction and the stupid decision to hold the swimsuit contest in bare feet, when every woman that legs should be shown to their best advantage by wearing heels. So back those heels!"

To be sure, the Miss America pageant many changes since the first contest in 1921. In 1945, the first scholarship grant awarded (to Bess Myerson, the first Jewish winner). In 1989, contestants encouraged to come up with platform statements on how they would serve as spokeswomen for Miss America. Past winners such as Phyllis George and Vanessa Williams to careers in broadcast journalism and entertainment.

Last year, Miss Oklahoma Shawntel Smith the judges' hearts (and $40,000) by supporting school-to-work programs as a way to solve the dropout problem. This year, contestants to support good eating habits and the rights of disabled children and to combat illiteracy and domestic abuse.

Under the new call-in system, viewers can dial one of 10 telephone lines to choose their favorite from among the final 10 contestants. Performance measured for several categories, including talent, interviews, "physical fitness in swimsuit," and "on-stage personality in evening wear." The results tabulated instantly to form a single vote, equal in importance to the votes of the other seven celebrity judges. When the final 10 contestants named, phone lines set up to block calls from those states to prevent larger states from dominating the vote.

But none of these changes to sway David Granger, executive editor of the men's magazine, GQ, in New York. When asked about the Miss America pageant, he : "They still that? It antiquated, it on its last legs."

"I can't speak on behalf of the American male," he continues with a sniff, "but I would hope that none of our readers would be interested."

Ann Salzmann
Intensive English Institute
University of Illinois