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Tomorrow, our strength will LAY....

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2amitprakash
 Post subject: Tomorrow, our strength will LAY....
 Post Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:48 pm 
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Course Students


Posts: 26
Sentence Correction (4th Ed), page 158/159
Could you please explain how the usage of LAY vs LIE is decided?

One usage of "LAY" marked as correct:
Yesterday, our strength lay in numbers.
I assumed any such usage in present or future tense will be correct too. This is not the case as the usage in future tense, is marked as wrong. As I understand, "lay" is a transitive verb and hence needs a direct object, so what is the direct object in the underlined sentence above?
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Ben Ku
 Post subject: Re: Tomorrow, our strength will LAY....
 Post Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:26 am 
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ManhattanGMAT Staff


Posts: 823
The lie vs. lay issue is confusing because we're actually talking about two different verbs: to lie and to lay.

The verb TO LIE is conjugated the following ways:
Past - lay
Present - lie
Future - will lie
This verb means to recline; you can say "to lie down."

The other verb TO LAY is conjugated the following ways:
Past - laid
Present - lay
Future - will lay
This verb means to place something on something. That means, this verb requires a direct object to make sense. "I lay the book on the table."

In your example, we're using the very TO LIE, so the past tense is "Yesterday, our strength LAY IN numbers." You can see when the word "lay" is used, it's confusing because it's the past tense for TO LIE while it's the present tense for TO LAY. Basically you have to determine the tense to figure out whether it's used correctly.

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Ben Ku
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ManhattanGMAT
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