The ground is wet. It must have rained. She pictured dark clouds, an umbrella forgotten on the bus. He’s not here. He might have been delayed. She imagined a broken-down train, a phone with a dead battery. Each wrong guess—she wrote should have rained first, then crossed it out—taught her something the answer key never could: why .
Maya stared at the crisp, white pages of her Grammar And Beyond Essentials Level 3 textbook. Exercise 2.2 on modal verbs of past probability ( must have, might have, could have, can’t have ) stared back, blank and unforgiving. Grammar And Beyond Essentials Level 3 Answer Key
She’d read the examples three times. “She must have forgotten the meeting.” “He can’ have left already.” But when she looked at sentence four—”The ground is wet; it ____ (rain) last night”—her mind went blank as fresh snow. The ground is wet
There it was. Page after page of neat, black type. For sentence four: must have rained . He’s not here
With a sigh, she did what she swore she’d never do. She opened her desk drawer, pulled out the slim, stapled booklet, and flipped to Unit 7.
Dr. Alvaro didn’t look angry. He looked disappointed. “The answer key is a map,” he said softly. “But you have to walk the road yourself. Go home. Don’t look at the key. Make ten wrong guesses. Then come see me.”