1. Should you travel to China, get off the train here

Paco travels to Southeast Asia: Hong Kong: The fragrant harbour

Map

2. Going up to Victoria Peak

3. Unless I am, I say

4. An opinion essay

5. Practice your English

6. Solved exercises

1. Should you travel to China, get off the train here

As you will have read in the previous section, there are some special patterns known as inversions for conditional sentences. These are not very common in spoken language and they are used in formal contexts. Below you can see the three different possibilities for inversion:

In type 1

"SHOULD" INVERTED	FUTURE or IMPERATIVE
Should my mother call me	tell her I'm not feeling too well.

In type 2

"WERE TO" INVERTED	CONDITIONAL
Were they to arrive tomorrow	we would have to buy some food.

In type 3

PAST PERFECT INVERTED	PERFECT CONDITIONAL
Had you seen what I saw	you would have also believed it.

Notice that the conjunction if is missed.

Solved exercise

In the passage in the previous section we can find the following two conditional sentences appearing as inversions:

Were you to take the ferry, you would have to buy the ticket before at the ticket office in the harbour.

Should you travel to China, get off the train here.

By Immanuel Giel- Creative Commons

Could you rewrite them without being inverted?

Further knowledge

Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the First Opium War (1839–1842). Originally confined to Hong Kong Island, the colony's boundaries were extended in stages so as to include the Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories by 1898. From 1998 Hong Kong is a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. Click on the photo to know more about this town.

In the next sections we will study other connectors also used in conditionals such as "provided/providing that, as long as or unless".

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