Tuesday 20 April 2010

Zero Conditional

In this mini lesson I want to explain the zero conditional. As you know there are a total of four conditionals used in English, and they are the zero, the first, the second, and the third conditional.
Each conditional describes a situation, either real or imagined called the condition which is followed by a result of that condition.
Each of the four conditional are defined by separate grammar rules.

In this mini lesson I want to explain the easiest of all the conditionals, and the one that is not taught in most books, this lesson is about the zero conditional.

The offices of SmartLanguageSolutions.com are near to Heathrow airport in south west London, this means sometimes planes fly over the office.
If a plane flies over the SmartLanguageSolutions.com office, we hear the noise from its engines.

In this sentence we used the zero condition to explain a fact that is always true, and this is the main use of the zero conditional.

For example:
If you heat water, it boils
or
If you run 10 kilometres every day, you will get fit.

Grammatically the zero conditional is constructed with:

If + a condition in the present simple, + a result in the present simple

Remember the zero conditional is used to express something that is always true.

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