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Select the correct form.
The Russian manager says his team isn't even thinking about _________________________ the tournament at this early stage.

Although the verb be is used to form the present continuous for is not thinking, after the preposition about we have to use a gerund: winning.

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Gerund

If you've ever said I enjoy to read or good at to swim and wondered why it sounded wrong, you've met the gerund. English is fussy about which structures take -ing and which take to + verb, and getting this wrong is one of the most common giveaways that someone learned grammar from a list rather than from real usage.

A gerund is the -ing form of a verb acting as a nounreading, swimming, being late. After many common verbs (enjoy, avoid, finish) and after every preposition, English demands the gerund, never the infinitive.

Participle

If you've ever written I should have went and been corrected to should have gone — you've hit the past participle's main rule. The participle isn't an exotic form; it's the workhorse that builds perfect tenses, passive voice, and dozens of common adjectives. Get the irregular ones automatic and your tenses fall into place.

A participle is a verb form acting as an adjective or adverb. The present participle is the -ing form (running, sitting); the past participle is -ed (regular: walked) or irregular (broken, gone, written). Participles build perfect tenses, progressive tenses, and the passive.

B2 | Upper Intermediate

If a university admissions team or visa office has ever asked you for an English test score, B2 is probably the level they had in mind. It's the threshold where your English stops being a constraint and starts being a tool — and the line between B1 and B2 is often the line between "stuck in beginner classes" and "ready to study or work in English."

B2 is the upper-intermediate level in the CEFR framework, demanding flexible control of mixed conditionals, passive voice across tenses, reported speech with backshifting, and participle clauses.

Difficulty: Hard

If easy and medium questions are clicking but you still feel exposed in real conversation or formal writing, you've outgrown the basics. Hard material is where the gaps you didn't know you had show up: the distractor that "sounds right", the rule that interacts with another rule, the case where context changes the answer. It's where genuine fluency is built.

The Hard difficulty tag marks upper-intermediate to advanced challenges — typically B2 and above. Interacting rules, edge cases, plausible distractors, and contexts that require genuine understanding rather than surface pattern-matching.