What would have happened if....?
"What would have happened if..." certainly looks difficult but we will see in this lesson that the idea is not difficult at all.Let's begin by watching a very short (8 seconds) video:
Player will show here
What did happen?
What happened in the video? A car ran through a red light and passed through a line of moving cars without hitting any of them.
What would have happened...?
Here we are talking about the same situation but we are not talking about what actually happened. Instead we are thinking about another possible result of the driver's action. Since this is a past situation we have to use past forms of the verb forms. The language is complicated, but the idea is not.
Try to answer this question:
What would have happened if the driver had gone through the stoplight a half a second earlier or a half a second later?