Difference between simple present and present continous tense?

Hi,

So i’ve been watching quite a lot of youtube videos recently, and then i came up wondering the difference between these 2 different youtube title;

  1. Michael Schumacher Overtaking Fernando Alonso, And
  2. Naughty kid throws a stick into the windshield.

Then my question is why is the first one use present continuos but the second one use simple present, despite the fact that the kid threw the stick in the past.

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There is no hard rule for naming videos. When you watch a video you see an action so choosing a gerund (overtaking) makes sense. It also makes sense to use the simple present (throws) because you can watch the video as often as you like and every time you watch the video you see the kid throwing a stick.

Please let me know if this makes sense and welcome to our forum.

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Both verbs are in the present tense because that’s how you describe the action in a film, play, video or whatever. In the first one you don’t know whether the driver completes the overtaking and you use the continuous form to indicate that this is ongoing.
In the second example the action is complete and so the tense is in the simple form.
Another example -
In this film you can see the child crosses the road - one side to the other.
In this film you can see the child is crossing the road - he hasn’t reached the other side yet.
Does that help?

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Thanks! This makes me so much sense

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Thank you very much! It helps a lot after all these years

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First sentence - Present Continuous because you can see this action right now, but it isn’t a habit or something like that. In second sentence you have to use Present Simple because the action is complete

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