TOEIC Link Reading Part 5 — Matching Verb Tense to the Time Marker

A large share of TOEIC Link Part 5 verb questions are not really testing whether you understand tense in the abstract. They are testing whether you noticed the one small word that fixes the tense for you. The four choices are usually the same verb in different forms — ship, ships, shipped, will ship, has shipped — and if you try to decide by asking "which tense sounds right here," you will stall, because two or three of them often sound acceptable in isolation. The sentence, however, almost always contains a time marker: a word or phrase such as yesterday, by next quarter, since 2019, currently, or every morning that only one tense can legally pair with. Find that marker first, and the verb form is no longer a judgment call.

Why the marker beats your ear

Your ear is trained on spoken English, where context and intonation carry a lot of the timing. Part 5 strips that away and gives you a single written sentence. In that vacuum, "The shipment ___ last Tuesday" can feel fine with arrived, but it would also feel fine, to a non-native ear, with has arrived. The difference is not audible — it is grammatical. Last Tuesday is a finished, specific past time, and English forbids the present perfect with a finished specific time. So the marker last Tuesday does not merely suggest the past simple; it rules out the present perfect entirely. That is the pattern to internalize: markers do not vote for a tense, they eliminate the tenses that cannot coexist with them. This is the same "read the slot, not the word" discipline behind preposition-versus-conjunction slotting — you decide by structure before you weigh meaning.

The core marker-to-tense table

Memorize which markers lock which tense. These are the pairings tested most often:

Notice that since and for both point to present perfect (an action running from the past into now), while ago and specific dates point to past simple. Mixing these up is the single most common trap in this question family.

Work an item mechanically

Take a representative stem:

"The regional manager ___ three new branches since the start of the fiscal year." (A) opens (B) opened (C) has opened (D) will open

Do not read the choices first. Scan the sentence for a time marker: "since the start of the fiscal year." Since marks an action that began in the past and continues to the present — that is the exclusive territory of the present perfect. Opens (habitual present) fails, opened (finished past) clashes with since, and will open (future) contradicts an action already underway. Only (C) has opened survives. You answered without deciding what "felt" right; the marker made the decision. That reliability is exactly why marker-hunting beats intuition on test day.

When the marker is hiding in another clause

The harder items put the marker in a neighboring clause rather than next to the blank. "By the time the inspector ___, the crew had already sealed the site" hides its logic in had already sealed: a past-perfect action (the sealing) that finished before a second past action, so the blank needs a plain past simple (arrived). Whenever you see had + past participle somewhere in the sentence, expect a second, later past action in the past simple to pair with it. Tracking how one clause's tense constrains another is the passage-level version of this same skill — see verb-tense consistency across a passage, where the marker for one blank often sits two sentences away.

Watch for the double-blank number trap

Some verb items combine tense with subject–verb agreement: the choices differ in both time and number (has completed vs. have completed vs. completed). Solve them in two steps — first let the time marker fix the tense, then let the subject fix the number. If since forces present perfect, you are choosing between has and have, and the subject (singular or plural, ignoring any phrase that sits between subject and verb) breaks the tie. Handling that intervening phrase cleanly is its own micro-skill, covered in subject–verb agreement with intervening phrases — the discipline of reading the true subject, not the nearest noun.

Practice routine

For the next two weeks, on every verb-form blank you meet, circle the time marker before you look at the answer choices. Write the tense it forces in the margin, then cross out every choice that is not that tense. If you cannot find a marker, widen your scan to the clause on the other side of the comma — it is almost always there, in the form of another verb or a date. You will find that most items collapse to a single legal answer the moment the marker is identified, and the rest reduce to a clean agreement decision. Speed on these questions comes not from knowing more tenses but from finding the one word that has already decided the tense for you.