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To clarify the title what I refer to is:

if clause type 0: If I drink too much coffee, I can't sleep at night.

and type 2: If we had a garden, we could have a cat. sentences are taken from BC Web site

I was writing an essay for the IELTS and wrote this sentence: If the government provides free education for these classes, children would gain access to them for free, regardless from their parents’s income.

So I consider a possible scenario here, nothing actually happens.

I know conditionals are all about ruleness-ness as once an experienced british private tutor told me in class.

But I don't know about if it is correct to mix them in formal english.

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  • ruleness-ness? Do you mean: correctness or not of x?
    – Lambie
    Commented Feb 21 at 18:04
  • When the government provides free education for these classes, children gain access to them for free, regardless from their parents’s income. No if at all. Anyway, the tenses are the same, even with if.
    – Lambie
    Commented Feb 21 at 18:05
  • The example would be fine in informal speech, but there are two errors. It should be "regardless of their parents' income". In more formal English, removing some of the redundancy "If the government were to provide free classes, children would gain access to them, regardless of their parents’ income".
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Jun 20 at 18:37
  • If the government provides free education for these classes, children will gain access.... OR If the government provided free education for these classes, children would gain access... It might not be noticed with multi-word elements, but I can't see many native speakers actually endorsing the pointless mismatch in If you go I would go and If you went I will go. Stick to If you go I will go and If you went I would go, which I'm sure is what you'll have been taught. The "mismatched" versions aren't "informal" - they're just klunky.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jun 20 at 19:28
  • ...it's not some complicated or arbitrary rule - it's just a trivial natural consequence of the fact that would is the "past tense" of will.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jun 20 at 19:32

1 Answer 1

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This mixture is (I think) fairly common in informal speech, but you would typically use the second conditional here, and say "provided" instead of "provides." This is correct even though the (hypothetical) providing is in the present or future.

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    Agreed. "Provided" makes sense because the condition is hypothetical. It's about what the government could or might do, which implies that the government is not currently doing it, and we have no idea how likely it is to act in the future.
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 3:52
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    Conversely "If the government provides... children will..." could be used if the government was seriously considering doing this.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 9:45
  • Can you Post some better examples, please? 'If the government provides free education…, children would gain access… for free, regardless from their parents’s income…' will never work in English, however obvious the sense seems. 'If I drink too much coffee, I can't sleep at night' works by itself. 'If we had a garden, we could have a cat' works by itself. How can you compare 'If I drink too much coffee' to 'If we had a garden'?
    – Robbie Goodwin
    Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 23:54

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