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Conditional Sentence | If Clause | Type One

Conditional Sentence or If Clause, according to Wikipedia.org, are sentences expressing factual implications, or hypothetical situations and their consequences. They are so called because the validity of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the existence of certain circumstances, which may be expressed in a dependent clause or may be understood from the context.

Further, it states that A full conditional sentence (one which expresses the condition as well as its consequences) therefore contains two clauses: the dependent clause expressing the condition, called the protasis; and the main clause expressing the consequence, called the apodosis. An example of such a sentence (in English) is the following:

        If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled.

The example above is then called Conditional Sentence Type I. This following illustration will give you best vision of what conditional sentence is.

From the picture here, it explains that the conditional event (If it rains) is positioned as a sub clause:

If + Main Clause

In this case, /If/ is conjunctive.
When the condition is true, the main clause /the picnic will be cancelled/ will be true as well. On the other hand, the sentence or main clause /the picnic will be cancelled/ dependes on the sub clause /if it rains/. That is why it has 50:50 in true or false.

This condition is called Type I where sub clause and main clause has the same result (true or false) in the future.

From the explanation above, the structure of the conditional sentence determines what pattern will be used to make a condition sentence type I. Here, it is built from sub clause in present simple and simple future tense.

Study this following pattern:

If it rains =  
Conjunction + Simple Present Tense in Verbal sentence.
The picnic will be cancelled =  
Simple Future Tense.

When it is implied in the formula, it should be like this:

Conj. IF + Subject + Verb, Subject + Will + Bare-Infinitive.

See you tomorrow!