A teacher trainer has been putting TikTok users to the test with a Year 6 SATs question even adults are finding difficult to answer. Less than two weeks after 10 and 11-year-old students across the country took their English, Maths and Science exams, ‘Grammar Slammer’ Sarah posted her latest mini-quiz to TikTok – and many people have been left stumped. Sarah’s question asked fans to rewrite a sentence in the passive form, taking the example of: “The wind damaged the fence.”
She explained that the sentence was “currently active”, adding: “We have ‘wind’ as the subject, ‘damaged’ as the verb and ‘fence’ is the object.”
“To make it passive, we’re going to move the object of the sentence to the beginning and make it the subject. So we’ll start the new sentence with fence then we will take the verb ‘to be’ and use it in the simple past ‘was’.”
“We then add the past participle of the verb, which is ‘damaged’ and stays the same.”
Sarah continued: “Then we need to say what damaged the fence and for that we use ‘by’.”
This means the correct answer to the brain teaser was: “The fence was damaged by the wind.”
For many of us, our SATs exams are a distant memory, but lots of TikTok users still struggled to answer the question. One responded: “I have an English degree and I said ‘what does passive mean?”
Another added: “Honestly, apart from saying ‘rephrase this’ who needs to know it’s passive? When is that relevant to life?”
Meanwhile, a third added: “I work in a primary school and couldn’t answer this,” and a fourth confessed: “I genuinely have no idea whether a sentence is passive or active.”
Those who managed to answer correctly claimed it was mere “luck”.
Sarah previously presented her followers with another challenge – to correctly place a comma in a sentence. The challenge was: “Insert one comma into the correct place in the question below,” which was: “Every night Dad and my brother take the dog for a walk.”
She said: “Commas are used in sentences to separate phrases and clauses”, before elaborating that the statement includes an “adverbial phrase” which is “telling us when the action is happening.”
“If an adverbial phrase leads a sentence, it is termed a ‘fronted adverbial’.”
She then revealed the correct answer: “Every night, Dad and my brother take the dog for a walk.”
Once again, not everyone found the question to be a walk in the park. One person wrote: “I got it right, but didn’t know the reason. It’s just the place where it makes sense to take a breath.”
Another said: “Commas are there to take a breath when reading out loud!”
And a third chimed in: “I got this right and I was taught its when you take a breath?”.
But Sarah was swift to debunk the “breath” myth, emphasizing the significance of teaching kids the proper terminology.
