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It is a rough sleepers area. TV crew member, Mark, wants to help them, so he approaches the tents which might have rough sleepers inside. And this sentence is said by the presenter:

Mark never knows what he is going to find.

"..never knows.." caught my attention. It seems to mean that he has no idea what he is going to find. For such situations, "He doesn't know ...." seems to work just fine to me, as a non-native speaker.

So, in what way it is different from "Mark doesn't know what he is going to find."?

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    Obviously Mark doesn't know what he is going to find could refer to a single situation (Mark has never approached a rough sleeper's tent before in his life), whereas Mark never knows what he is going to find can only be used if Mark has done this many times in the past.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented yesterday
  • @Fumblefingers, This is completely new to me. I didn't think it has a connotation that Mark has done this many times in the past. But then something confuses me. If the speaker wants to emphasize this was not his first time doing that, why doesn't he say "Mark has never known what he is going to find?"
    – Yunus
    Commented yesterday
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    Because it's about a long-term / eternal truth. Consider #1 The sun never rises in the west, which is much more likely than #2 The sun has never risen in the west (where #2 implies "...but things might change"). Also consider #3 Mark has never known what time he'll get home after work, which could be said some time after Mark retires from the job, whereas #4 Mark never knows what time he'll get home after work becomes invalid immediately upon his retirement.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented yesterday

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Here are a pair of sentences that are completely analogous to yours:

She doesn’t have a pen

may describe an unusual circumstance. Perhaps she is generally quite reliable at having a pen in her possession. But

She never has a pen

describes a general pattern. Unlike your Mark never knows, this sentence could well be a complaint expressing a judgment that she is forgetful, careless, inconsiderate, or something like that.

Your Mark never knows implies that circumstances are so unpredictable that there is no way that Mark could know ahead of time what he will find.

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  • Does "to know" in this sentence mean something like "to guess". "He never guesses what he is going to find?" Or maybe "He can not ever know what is going to find".
    – Yunus
    Commented yesterday
  • No. The expression one never knows means exactly what its constituent words would suggest, that one can never be certain. I might well guess that our son will bring a bottle of wine—since he often does—but he does enjoy surprising us. So I never know what he will bring.
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented yesterday
  • You never know expresses a weaker claim then You can never have any idea.
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented yesterday
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When you opened a box of Cracker Jack™ (the product jingle 🎶 went "candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize, that's what you get with Cracker Jack") you never knew what little prize you were going to get. It would be some small charm, ring, or other trinket.

He does not know what kind of situation he will encounter. Life among the rough sleepers (a British-English euphemism for the homeless) is unpredictable. "Mark never knows" implies that Mark has visited the tent city multiple times, and has been met with a variety of challenging situations. There is an element of surprise, but not pleasant surprise, since "what he is going to find" (a collocation) has somewhat ominous overtones.

Sometimes on my way home from work my heart starts beating rapidly.I never know what I'm going to find. Last week the dog had swallowed a mitten. A month ago our twin boys aged 9 started a small fire in the kitchen trying to toast marshmallows over the gas stove in the kitchen. And this past summer they were squirting each other with the hose in the back yard but never turned it off, and I didn't discover it for three days. You should have seen our water bill!

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