Quiz playing is a wonderful way to increase your knowledge of English as a Second Language. Remember that all of our ESL quizzes have titles that are both friendly and technical at the same time… In the case of this quiz you might like to tell your friends about “May I?” but no doubt your teachers will talk about the “Permission quiz”! If you hear a technical term and you want to find a quiz about the subject then just look through the list of quiz titles until you find what you need.
'May I ... ?' (or better still, 'Please may I ... ?') is the best and simplest way to ask permission to do something, in English. But there are a lot of quite interesting and subtle variations on this - else we would be using the same phrase a great deal, which would become repetitive and boring.
This quiz aims to help expand your awareness, and repertoire, of ways of asking permission.
Answer 1 is possible and quite widely-heard still, but it is short and rather 'off-handed'; it sounds almost automatic, and lacking in any 'human warmth'. Neither Answer 3 nor 4 is usual; these are the wrong auxiliary verbs, and too tentative.