Lesson: Grammar Tidbit - Gerunds

Comment on Grammar Tidbit - Gerunds

Hi,

What about this sentence - Smoking causes cancer.
Is 'smoking' a gerund in this sentence?

Thanks.
gmat-admin's picture

Yes, "smoking" a gerund in this sentence, because it's playing the role of a noun. In fact, "smoking" is the subject that performs the verb ("causes").

Who/what CAUSES cancer? Smoking does.

In the sentence, "I'm interested in wine-tasting", is wine-tasting a gerund?
gmat-admin's picture

That's correct.

In the following sentences are the -ing words gerunds

Let's go swimming
Running in place makes me tired
You got caught jumping on the bed
gmat-admin's picture

- Let's go swimming: SWIMMING is a gerund.
- Running in place makes me tired: RUNNING is a gerund.
- You got caught jumping on the bed: JUMPING is a participle.

Jay enjoys swimming
In this sentence is enjoys a linking verb or action verb?
gmat-admin's picture

ENJOYS is an action verb, and SWIMMING is a gerund.

My favourite past time is stamp collecting. Does stamp collecting acts as an adjective giving additional information about the noun (My)? How can it acts as a gerund and moreover, gerunds acts as only nouns and they do not modify the nouns. In the sentence “ is “ functioning as a linking verb.Hence, whatever comes next to the linking verb should function as an adjective .Pls explain me .
gmat-admin's picture

"Hence, whatever comes next to the linking verb should function as an adjective"

That's not quite right.
In the lesson on linking verbs (https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gmat-sentence-correction/video/1151), I say "A MODIFIER that follows a linking verb must be an adjective."

So, for example, we might write: Joe is HAPPY.
Here, HAPPY is an adjective that tells us more about Joe.

Likewise, in the sentence "Sue seems UPSET," UPSET is an adjective that tells us more about Sue.

Now let's examine the following sentence: My favorite pastime is stamp collecting.
Here, STAMP functions as an adjective, BUT it modifies COLLECTING (not PASTIME)
If we ignore the adjective STAMP, we get: My favorite pastime is collecting.
At this point we can see that FAVORITE PASTIME = COLLECTING (stamp collecting to be more precise)

Does that help?

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