essay in past indefinite tense

English With Ashish

Past Indefinite tense: rules, usages and tips

Most of our conversations are incomplete without using the Past Indefinite tense. And if you are a girl, this probably is more true.

Why am I saying it? Why is the Past Indefinite tense vital to use in the English language?

Most of our conversations are almost incomplete without gossiping about someone’s past or narrating a story or simply talking about a past event. And that is why we need this tense.

When to use the Past indefinite tense?

Past Indefinite tense definition: The Past Indefinite tense, also known as the Simple Past tense , is used to talk about actions that occurred in the past at a specific time.

Always remember, the time of the action, if not already understood, needs to be mentioned as this is an important facet of the Past Indefinite tense.

The word that talks about the past time is called the past time marker. Here are some common time markers:

Yesterday, last night, last week, last month, last year, last summer, last season, last decade, last quarter, last night, that day, that night, etc.

The Past Indefinite tense examples

She proposed me last night.
One of my school friends had an accident last week.
I woke up at 5 a.m.
Jim died in a car accident last year.
We went to see him yesterday.
He said a lot of mean things to me in that meeting.
We did not say anything to him. He looked out of his mind.
Why did you call me yesterday?
What did you have last night?

NOTE : avoid mentioning the time of the action if that is already understood by the person/people that you are communicating with.

Look at the following conversation to understand the context:

Mom : Where did you go last night? Me : I went to Jim’s place.

Mom : What did you guys do after I left? Me : We worked on a project together and discussed some things.

Notice, the conversation is about a particular time in the past that is “last night.” In the first sentence, the past time marker is mentioned, so we don’t need to use it over and over again, and we did not.

Now, before we look at different situations where we use the Past Indefinite tense, let’s look at how to form sentences in Past Indefinite tense.

The Past Indefinite tense structure

Let’s look at rules of the Past Indefinite tense now!

1. Affirmative sentence

They insulted me in that meeting.
My students played a prank on me in the previous class.
She called me 15 times last night.

2. Negative sentences

They did not insult me in that meeting.
My students didn’t play a prank on me in the previous class.
She didn’t call me last night.

Didn’t = did not

3. Interrogative sentences

Use the following structure to ask a question that can be answered in YES or NO:

Did you call me last night?
Did you just touch me?
Did she just call you a moron?
Did they live with you?

All these questions can be answered in simple YES or NO. To know the details of the event happened, use the following WH question words before the auxiliary verb (DID): what, when, where, why, how

When did you call me?
Why did you just touch me?
What did he eat with you in the party?
How did you do that?
Where did they live with you?

NOTE : use ‘NOT’ after the subject to form an interrogative negative sentence. But avoid asking negative questions as they confuse people in terms of whether the answer should be positive or negative.

Here’s an example of an interrogative negative sentence in the Past Indefinite tense:

Did you not eat my sandwich?

Wasn’t it confusing to answer? 😉

Now, let’s talk about different usages of the Past Indefinite tense.

The Past Indefinite tense usages

1. to talk about actions happened at a particular time in the past.

The most common way to use the Past Indefinite tense is to talk about actions that happened at a particular time in the past. Here are some examples for demonstration:

She came to see me last night.
We went shopping in the morning.
Did you talk to him yesterday?
Everybody supported me in that meeting.

2. A series of completed actions

If a series of actions happened at a particular time in the past, use the Past indefinite tense to talk about it.

Last night, he walked into my room, woke me up, and took me somewhere with him.
After reaching there in the morning, we checked in to the hotel, got into our room, had breakfast, and went shopping.
Yesterday, after the class, we closed the door, turned the music on, and started dancing like no one was there in the college.

3. Repeated actions/habits in the past

If an action occurred multiple times in the past, use the Past Indefinite tense to talk about it.

We never attended his class, we always bunked it.
Jon worked at a hotel after school.
I played cricket when I was in college.
She played the guitar in school.

4. To describe something or someone

Another common usage of the Past Indefinite tense is to describe someone or something in the past. Here are the examples that demonstrate it:

He was sad last night.
They were very mean to me in school.
She was not happy in the meeting.
The movie was spine-chilling.
The food was scrumptious.
Last night, the weather was extremely pleasant.
You were my friend last night.

Structure : Subject + was/were + adjective/noun

Singular subject = was
Plural subject = were

5. To talk about the completed action and its duration in the past

If an action happened for a period of time in the past, use the Past Indefinite tense to talk about it.

I lived in Japan for 5 years.
Last night, we danced for hours.
Riya and I talked on the phone for an hour.
Everyone waited for you at the stand for some hours.
Max studied Chinese for 4 years.

6. To talk about something that happened a few moments ago (extremely close to the present)

Let’s look at some conversations to understand the usage.

Situation 1:

Arun: Hey, Jon. Somebody is calling you a moron. Jon to the crowd: Hey, who called a moron? Then goes a guy in the red coat says: Was it you who called me a moron? The guy: No, I didn’t do it.

Situation 2:

You are eating some fish chips and mashed potatoes at a restaurant. You go to the loo, leaving your food on your table. You come back and see the number of chips isn’t the same. It is less than what you left. You feel someone just ate it.

Then you shout to the crowd: Who ate my chips? “Did you eat my chips?”, you say to a group of people sitting at table number 5. We didn’t touch my chips . Why would we?! We have our own food to eat.

Notice in both the situations, the speaker (at the end) uses the simple past tense without mentioning the time of the action as the time is just now: very close to the present

Use of adverbs in the Past Indefinite tense

Adverbs like just, recently, never are placed just after the subject.

I just called her.
I never played cricket in school.
Jon recently bought a car.

The Past Indefinite tense active and passive voice

I bought a car last night. (active)
A car was bought last night (by me). (passive)
She called me yesterday. (active)
I was called yesterday. (passive)
Did you finish the book last week? (active)
Was the book finished last week? (passive)
She baked some amazing cookies. (active)
Some amazing cookies were baked (by her). (passive)

TIP : use the passive structure of the Past Indefinite tense when what the action acted upon is more important than who did it. And we generally don’t mention the doer of the action in passive voice.

Also check out the post on the Present indefinite tense .

Here is my YouTube video on the past indefinite tense:

Hope you enjoyed the lesson! Feel free to share your question, doubt, or feedback in the comment section, and also, share the post with the people that need it.

For one-on-one classes, contact me at [email protected] .

Ashish Sharma

Ashish found his first love—the English language—a few years back. Since then, he has been immersed in the language, breaking down the language and teaching it to passionate English learners. He has a flair for listening to the English language (podcasts, sitcoms, stories), observing the nuances, and making it easy for English learners. He is known for breaking down complex English topics and making them easy to be understood.

2 thoughts on “Past Indefinite tense: rules, usages and tips”

Hello Ashish Bhai, awesome post. Keep it up. I am learning lot’s of things from your yt channel and now it’s time to learn from here(website). Thank you 🙂

Thank you, Prince! Happy to know that you find my posts informative!

Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work

Marcus Froland

March 28, 2024

Let’s talk about one of the building blocks of English language – the past indefinite tense . It might sound a bit technical, but believe me, it’s something you use all the time without even realizing. Remember when you told your friend, “I watched a movie last night”? That right there is an example. The past indefinite tense helps us share our stories, experiences, and day-to-day happenings.

Understanding this tense can be a game-changer for anyone trying to get a grip on English. It’s not just about knowing the rules; it’s about getting comfortable with how they’re used in real-life situations. And guess what? You’ve already got a head start because you use these forms often in conversation. But here’s where it gets interesting: How do we take this knowledge and apply it to improve our communication skills further?

You might think that mastering past indefinite tense is only important for students or language learners. But imagine being able to tell your stories more vividly or report events more accurately. The benefits spill over into everyday interactions making understanding its nuts and bolts crucial yet intriguing.

The Past Indefinite Tense is used to talk about actions that happened at a specific time in the past. This tense does not tell us exactly when the action took place, only that it did happen. For example, sentences like “I ate breakfast” or “She went to school” are in the past indefinite tense because they mention actions completed in the past without specifying when. It’s important for English learners to understand this tense for clear and effective communication about past events. Recognizing and using the past indefinite tense correctly helps in constructing accurate and straightforward sentences about previous activities or situations.

Understanding the Basics of Past Indefinite Tense

The Past Indefinite Tense, also known as the Simple Past, represents completed actions in the past that are disconnected from the present moment. This tense informs about past events with clear completion, making it distinct from the Present Perfect Tense, which suggests ongoing relevance. To understand the formation of Past Indefinite Tense and the rules governing its use, it’s essential to examine its structure, verb forms, and the time expressions associated with it.

The primary structure of the Past Indefinite Tense is formed using the second form (V2) of the verb when making statements. For negations and questions, “did” is used alongside the base form (V1) of the verb. The tense commonly employs time expressions, such as “yesterday,” “ago,” and “last,” to denote the specific time in the past when the action occurred. To illustrate how this tense is applied, consider these examples:

He played football.
She didn’t wash her car.
Did they visit the museum yesterday?

It’s crucial to recognize that the Past Indefinite Tense always refers to completed actions that occurred in the past, with no connection to the present moment. This aspect sets it apart from other past tenses that may have a continuing influence on the present. To further understand the significance of the Past Indefinite Tense, you can explore the conjugation of regular and irregular verbs, along with the techniques for constructing affirmative, negative, and interrogative sentences in this tense.

Structuring Sentences in the Past Indefinite Tense

The Past Indefinite Tense has a versatile framework for constructing affirmative sentences, negative statements, and questions. It is essential to understand the appropriate sentence structures and apply them confidently in daily conversations and written communications.

Affirmative Sentence Construction

Affirmative sentences in the Past Indefinite Tense require the second form of the verb. The structure generally follows “Subject + V2 + Other Words” format. This principle applies to all subjects, regardless of number and person, with regular verbs ending in “ed” or “d” and irregular verb forms like “went” or “spoke”.

She worked on that project for a month.
Michael went to California last summer.

Forming Negative Statements

Negative statements in the Past Indefinite Tense include “did not” or “didn’t” before the base form of the verb. For example, “I did not bake the cake.” For the verb “to be,” use “was not” or “wasn’t” for singular subjects and “were not” or “weren’t” for plural subjects.

We didn’t visit the museum during our trip.
They weren’t present at the meeting yesterday.

Asking Questions with Past Indefinite Tense

Questions in the Past Indefinite Tense position “did” before the subject, followed by the base form of the main verb. For instance, “Did you bake the cake?” No auxiliary “did” is needed with the verb “to be”; instead, “was” or “were” start the question.

Example: Did you complete your homework on time?

Here is a comparison table of the different Past Indefinite Tense structures:

By practicing and understanding these Past Indefinite Tense sentence structures, you will be able to communicate more effectively and accurately about past events and activities. Mastering these rules will enrich your English language proficiency and deepen your understanding of grammar complexities.

The Role of Regular and Irregular Verbs

When forming past tense sentences, the verbs you encounter play a crucial role in making your statements grammatically correct. In English, there are two main categories of verbs: regular and irregular. Understanding the difference between these two types of verbs is essential for mastering past tense verb forms .

Regular verbs are those that follow predictable rules for forming their past tense. This typically involves adding “-ed” or “-d” to the root of the verb. For example:

Work → Worked
Play → Played
Attend → Attended

Regular verbs maintain the same form irrespective of the subject, making it easy to learn and use them in past tense sentences.

On the other hand, irregular verbs are verbs with unique past tense forms that don’t follow a predictable pattern. They can be challenging to learn because the only way to master these forms is by memorizing them. Some common examples of irregular verbs include:

Take → Took
Be → Was/Were

Irregular verbs vary in their past tense forms and must be used accordingly to maintain grammatical accuracy.

It’s important to familiarize yourself with both regular and irregular verbs to effectively use the past tense in your communication. To help make the learning process more structured, you can create a table of the most common verbs:

By understanding the distinction between regular and irregular verbs and mastering their past tense forms, you will be well-equipped to create grammatically accurate sentences in the past indefinite tense.

Subject-Verb Agreement in Past Tense

It is crucial to understand the concept of subject-verb agreement in past tense when learning and utilizing the English language effectively. Subject-verb agreement in the Past Indefinite Tense necessitates that the verbs remain constant across different subjects, with one notable exception – the verb “to be,” which switches between “was” for singular subjects and “were” for plural subjects.

Consistency is key when employing subject-verb agreement in past tense sentences – regardless of the subject’s person or number, the verb form should remain the same. Let’s explore some examples to demonstrate how subject-verb agreement works in Past Indefinite Tense.

He smiled at his friend. They smiled at their friends. The teacher was explaining the lesson. The teachers were explaining the lessons.

As illustrated by the examples above, the verb forms “smiled” and “explaining” remain consistent across different subjects. However, the verb “to be” varies between “was” and “were” based on whether the subject is singular or plural.

Moreover, mastering subject-verb agreement in past tense also includes understanding the usage of regular and irregular verbs. The following table illustrates the consistent application of regular and irregular verbs with different subjects:

With clear understanding and consistent practice of subject-verb agreement in past tense, you can enhance your ability to compose grammatically correct and fluent sentences in English, ultimately leading to improved communication skills.

Common Uses of the Past Indefinite Tense in Everyday Language

When communicating about past events, the Past Indefinite Tense plays a crucial role in various contexts. It is frequently employed in everyday language for diverse purposes. Some common applications of this tense include describing actions accomplished with time expressions, narrating past habits, sharing personal history, and inquiring about past events:

Completed actions with time expressions

Past habits

Actions that lasted for a specific period

Storytelling and narrations

Asking about past events

Let’s discuss these uses in more detail below:

Past Indefinite Tense is often used to refer to events that took place at specific moments in the past. Time expressions such as “yesterday,” “last week,” and “two years ago” are used to emphasize the particular time when the action occurred. For instance:

He visited Paris last summer.
She started her new job two months ago.
They attended the concert yesterday.

To describe habits or repeated actions that took place in the past, the Past Indefinite Tense is most suitable. These past habits can be almost anything, from daily routines to seasonal activities, as demonstrated in the examples below:

I used to exercise every morning before work.
She always carried an umbrella during the rainy season.
They played soccer together every weekend.

The Past Indefinite Tense lends itself well to discussing actions that extended over a particular period. This includes activities such as vacations, projects, or other events that commenced and concluded in the past:

We lived in Chicago for five years.
She worked on that project for several months.
They traveled through Europe during their summer vacation.

When it comes to sharing stories and recounting personal history, the Past Indefinite Tense is invaluable. It allows you to paint vivid pictures of past events that are clearly separated from the present:

He climbed Mount Everest and celebrated his achievement at the summit.
They adopted a rescue dog and named him Max.
She won a prestigious award for her innovative research.

Inquiring about past incidents also calls for the use of Past Indefinite Tense, as it emphasizes the focus on past actions and their completion:

Did you finish your homework last night?
When did they move to their new home?
How did you meet your best friend?

By understanding the various situations where the Past Indefinite Tense is appropriate, you will be better equipped to use it naturally and effectively in your everyday communications.

Comparing Past Indefinite Tense with Other Past Tenses

Understanding the distinction between various past tenses is crucial for mastering English grammar. In this section, we will focus on the differences between the Past Indefinite and Present Perfect Tense, highlighting their unique characteristics and usage.

Distinction from Present Perfect Tense

A major point of difference between Past Indefinite vs Present Perfect Tense is their relationship with the present. The Past Indefinite Tense focuses on describing actions that occurred and completed in the past with no connection to the present time. On the other hand, Present Perfect Tense is used for actions that started in the past and have relevance to the present, or actions completed without mentioning specific time markers.

Another factor that aids in past tense comparisons is the use of time expressions. Past Indefinite Tense requires definite time expressions such as “yesterday,” “last week,” or “a year ago.” In contrast, Present Perfect Tense employs indefinite time expressions like “ever,” “never,” “since,” and “for.”

Example: Past Indefinite Tense – “I visited Rome last summer.” (completed action with specific time) Present Perfect Tense – “I have visited Rome.” (completed action affecting the present but without specific time)

Let’s consider a table that further showcases the difference between Past Indefinite and Present Perfect Tense in various contexts:

Keeping these differences in mind will help you express yourself more accurately and choose the correct tense for various situations. Remember, Past Indefinite Tense is dedicated to narrating completed actions in the past, while Present Perfect Tense captures actions with ongoing relevance or without specific time markers.

Practical Examples of Past Indefinite Tense in Use

The Past Indefinite Tense is a versatile and essential part of everyday language that encapsulates completed events, past habits, and narration. In this section, we will explore practical examples of the Simple Past Tense to help you better understand its usage in various contexts.

They flew to Paris last summer.

I always drank coffee in the morning before starting work.

She taught me to dance when I was a child.

These examples demonstrate the wide-ranging functionality of the Past Indefinite Tense and the need to master it for fluency in English. Let us now examine a table showcasing more examples of past tense in context along with the corresponding base forms of the verbs used, to aid comprehension.

By examining these examples and consistently practicing the formation and usage of the Past Indefinite Tense, you can enhance your ability to communicate effectively in English and share your experiences with precision and clarity.

Tips for Mastering Past Indefinite Tense in English

Learning the Past Indefinite Tense is essential for effective communication in English. To excel in this tense, you should immerse yourself in the language and practice regularly. Here are some helpful tips that will aid you in mastering this grammatical concept.

First, familiarize yourself with both regular and irregular verb forms, as these are crucial for constructing accurate past tense sentences. Regular verbs typically end in “-ed” or “-d,” while irregular verbs have unique past forms like “went” or “saw.” Create flashcards or refer to a list of irregular verb conjugations to commit these forms to memory.

Next, practice past tense sentence construction through exercises and storytelling activities. Share a personal anecdote or create fictional narratives to apply your knowledge of the Past Indefinite Tense in context. By doing so, you will naturally understand the tense’s nuances and how to use it effectively.

Finally, incorporate time expressions related to the past, such as “yesterday,” “ago,” and “last,” in your sentences. This will help you enhance your fluency and comprehension of the Past Indefinite Tense. Additionally, consuming English-language media like books, television shows, and podcasts will expose you to real-life examples and promote a more natural understanding of this fundamental tense.

The English Grammar Tenses Collection

Click Here for Step-by-Step Rules, Stories and Exercises to Practice All English Tenses

Click Here for Step-by-Step Rules, Stories and Exercises to Practice All Tenses

What does TENSE Mean?

It comes from the Latin word "tempus", which means "time".

Simple present, simple present story 1, simple present story 2, simple present story 3, simple present story 4, present progressive, present progressive story 1, present progressive story 2, present progressive story 3, present progressive story 4, present perfect, present perfect story 1.

Linda has just walked outside with Grandmother. She wears an apron. So far, she has finished cleaning and washing. She has also gathered seeds and crumbs.

Now Linda and Grandmother are outside. Linda has just dropped some seeds on the ground to feed the birds. The birds have not come yet.

Recently, Grandmother has moved in with Linda's family. She now enjoys living with them.

Grandmother has already sat down on the bench. She also wears an apron. She has just finished cooking.

Present Perfect Story 2

Present perfect story 3, present perfect story 4, present perfect progressive, present perfect progressive story 1, present perfect progressive story 2, present perfect progressive story 3, present perfect progressive story 4, simple past, simple past story 1, simple past story 2, simple past story 3, simple past story 4, past progressive, past progressive story 1, past progressive story 2, past progressive story 3, past progressive story 4, past perfect, past perfect story 1, past perfect story 2, past perfect story 3, past perfect story 4, past perfect progressive, past perfect progressive story 1, past perfect progressive story 2, past perfect progressive story 3, past perfect progressive story 4, simple future, simple future story 1, simple future story 2, simple future story 3, simple future story 4, future progressive, future progressive story 1 , future progressive story 2, future progressive story 3, future progressive story 4, future perfect, future perfect story 1, future perfect story 2, future perfect story 3, future perfect story 4, future perfect progressive, future perfect progressive story 1, future perfect progressive story 2, future perfect progressive story 3, future perfect progressive story 4.

Examples of English Tenses

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Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work

Knowing how to use tenses correctly and appropriately is a major part of using the English language and thus, being taken seriously. The past indefinite is so commonly used that it's important to cover it early on.

The past indefinite is used to refer to something that happened in the past. It is also referred to as 'past simple'; an appropriate name as it is the most basic form of past tenses in the English language. By this, we mean that it follows an uncomplicated structure and takes on a straightforward set of rules.

An example of a past indefinite sentence is " I went to school in California".

It is one of the first of the past tenses that students would focus on in school, which is why it’s the tense that we’re focusing on today. We’ll cover everything from what it is, how it’s structured, and how to use it in everyday situations.

What is the Past Indefinite Tense?

Why are tenses so important when it comes to learning the English language, as well as speaking it? And what purpose does the past indefinite tense serve? That is what you are about to find out.

Tenses and Their Purpose

Tenses are used to modify verbs, in a way that tells the speaker whether we’re talking about the past, present, or future. In fact, tenses are so evolved that we can even use them to infer whether something is still happening, ended a long time ago, ended recently, or even to differentiate between an action in the past that you did once and one that you did continuously.

Isn’t language just so smart?

The Past Indefinite Tense

The past indefinite tense is also called the past simple. It is used to refer to something that happened in the past, as you may have guessed from the name. It is the most basic form of past tenses, hence why it’s called the ‘Past Simple’.

Other Tenses

Other past tenses in the English language include the Past Continuous, the Past Perfect, and the Past Perfect Continuous.

But there aren’t only past tenses, as we are sure you know. There are also present and future tenses, to cater to when we want to describe an event that takes place in the present or is yet to take place in days or years to come.

Here’s a list of the different tenses of the English language:

Present Simple
Present Continuous
Present Perfect
Present Perfect Continuous
Past Simple
Past Continuous
Past Perfect
Past Perfect Continuous
Future Simple
Future Continuous
Future Perfect
Future Perfect Continuous

The Past Indefinite Structure

That’s all well and good, we hear you say. But how do you actually use it? That’s what we’ll get onto next.

Verb 1, Verb 2, Verb 3

Firstly to build a sentence using the past indefinite tense, you’ll need to know how to conjugate a verb into its past indefinite tense. The basic rule is as follows.

Take the infinitive of the verb and add ‘ed’, or simply ‘d’ if the verb already ends with an ‘e’. For example:

Play → played
Walk → walked

Many verbs end in a vowel and a consonant. An extra consonant is added when these verbs are turned into the past tense. For example, ‘admit’ turns into ‘admitted’. See how we added another ‘t’ and then ‘ed’. Some other examples include:

Stop → stopped
Plan → planned

There! Simple enough right? We wish. But you know just as well as I do that the English language is full to the brim with irregular verbs. So for this reason, we’re going to introduce you to a very handy concept that will help you. The concept of verb 1, verb 2, and verb 3. Verb 1 refers to the infinitive form of a verb; verb 2 refers to the past simple form of a verb, and verb 3 refers to the participle form.

Here are a few examples:

This concept and table are handy for remembering how to conjugate verbs. That’s because there are so many irregular verbs in the English language, and with that many instances where the rules don’t apply, it’s a handy way to remember.

People tend to recite verbs 1, 2, and 3 like a song. In this way, it helps them remember how to conjugate irregular verbs. For example, if you ask someone what the past indefinite tense of the verb ‘to eat’ is, you might hear them go “eat, ate, eaten… it’s ‘eaten’!

Affirmative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

Another kind of past indefinite sentence you can use is an affirmative sentence. These are used to state something that is true to the speaker, a fact, or an opinion about something that did happen, as opposed to negative sentences.

The basic structure of an affirmative sentence in the past indefinite tense:

Subject + V2 + object/modifier + past time marker (optional)

For example:

I swam home
They drew pictures
He accepted his fate

Of course, you can make this sentence more complex by adding in other parts of the sentence, such as marker in time, adverbs, adjectives, and so on.

Since the trains were canceled, I swam home instead.
Unexpectedly, they drew pictures all day last Tuesday.

Negative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

The second kind of past indefinite sentence you can use is a negative sentence. It’s used to negate something, or in other words, to say how something didn’t happen, or isn’t true.

The basic structure of a negative sentence in the past indefinite tense is quite different from that of a positive sentence. It looks like this:

Subject + did + not + V1

As you can see, the verb ‘did’ is already in the past indefinite tense, so that’s taken care of. This means that your main verb can remain in the infinitive - or verb 1 form. This means the structure of past indefinite negative sentences is actually much easier to use since it doesn’t rely on remembering the V2 conjugations.

I did not know that
I did not dance at the ball
I didn’t do it

Note: ‘didn’t’ and ‘did not’ are interchangeable.

As with affirmative past indefinite sentences, you can keep it simple or create pretty complex sentences.

Interrogative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

This one’s also pretty self-explanatory, but we’ll go ahead and explain it anyway. Interrogative sentences are used to ask questions (‘interrogative’ comes from the verb ‘to interrogate’). Therefore, the purpose of interrogative sentences in the past indefinite tense is to ask a question about an event from the past.

Their basic structure is the following:

Did + subject + V1 + ?

Here are some examples:

Did you go?
Did you hear?
Did John quit?

Here are some examples of more complex sentences, created by adding other types of words to the above basic structure:

Did you go to the pub after work?
Did you hear about John and Carol?
Did John quit his job?

Or, to make things interesting, you could even add in a WH question word. See the following examples:

When did you go to the pub?
What did you hear, any gossip?
Why did John quit his job?

When to Use the Past Indefinite

Now that you know how to structure a verb in the past indefinite tense, you know that it’s the perfect tense to use when talking about events that started and ended in the past. In other words, they are no longer happening. Unlike some tenses, which can be used to describe an event that started in the past but is still ongoing in the present.

So which contexts can you use the past indefinite in? Let’s talk about it.

Events That Happened in the Past

The past indefinite or past simple is perfect if you want to simply state an event that happened in the past. For example:

She learned to speak Japanese.

Moods or States of Being in the Past

This tense can also be used to talk about how you or someone else was in the past. For example:

We were very happy living in Vancouver.

Repeated Actions in the Past

Talking about a habit you had in the past? Something you did often? The past indefinite is perfect for that.

We always played in the park after school.

To Conclude

There are many more uses of the past indefinite that we could probably think of, but likely too many to cover in this article. That’s how popular this tense is!

Do you have any ideas of other contexts it could be used in? We're sure if you give it a little thought, you'll be able to come up with lots of others.

In the meantime, hopefully, you feel clearer about the use of the past indefinite tense - also called the past simple tense - and know when and how to employ it.

Learn More:

Present Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work
'Lead' or 'Led': What Is the Past Tense of 'Lead'?
'Walked Passed' or 'Walk Past': Which is Correct?
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'Hanged' or 'Hung': What's the Difference?
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Yes/No Questions: What Are Closed Questions? Definition and Examples

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Past Indefinite Tense | Definite, Structure and Examples

Past indefinite tense.

We need to use Past Indefinite Tense to indicate past actions or past habits. Past Indefinite Tense is also known as the ‘Simple Past’ tense. But the question is, what is the definite of Past Indefinite Tense? The definition is very simple. When we indicate a complete action in the past or a past habit, it’s called Past Indefinite Tense. For example:

I did my duty correctly.
He retired from his job.
She controlled her weight.
Lopa completed her homework.
They missed their childhood.

Structure: Subject+Verb(past form)+Object

Let us see the different forms of Past Indefinite Tense:

Examples of Past Indefinite Tense

Let us see some examples of Past Indefinite Tense:

I got the point.
He went to a historical place yesterday.
You observed the situation.
We found our weakness.
Alim attended the program.
Lee passed the last examination.
Did you miss your friend?
We enjoyed the party last night.
They watched a horror movie.
I forgot to participate in the program.
I improved my English skills slowly.
You did not catch the fish.
Did you not accept the proposal?
He ate good food yesterday.
She waited for you two days ago.
Brendon reached his campus.
Kamran borrowed a book from his friend.
Did they solve the issue correctly?
We missed our old days.
He was appointed as an officer in charge.

Azizul Hakim is the founder & CEO of englishfinders.com . He is a passionate writer, English instructor, and content creator. He has completed his graduation and post-graduation in English language and literature.

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Future Indefinite Tense | Definition, Structure, and Examples

Past Indefinite Tense (Simple Past): 4 Rules & Examples

Want to learn 4 rules and examples of Past Indefinite Tense/ Simple Past Tense to express any action or event of the past maintaining the rules of using past forms of verbs and their structure? Here is the lesson to learn the proper way of using past indefinite tense along with its structures, variations, and usages.

Through learning this lesson, you will be able to describe any action or event of the past time in written form.

So, let’s jump there…

But, first of all, we have to learn the structure and form of past indefinite tense. If you haven’t studied other previous lessons on the tense classifications , i would like to suggest you to read those lessons first before going through this lesson.

What is Past Indefinite Tense?

The tense through which any action or event of past is expressed, is considered as Past Indefinite Tense in English grammar. We use this tense in order to express the acts of past using past form of verbs and some past tense markers phrases .

Most importantly, the past form of a verb in a sentence is considered as the basic sign of simple past tense. It’s similar to the structure of present indefinite/ simple present tense . The only difference is the time frame of an action or event.

At first notice these sentences in past indefinite tense: I bought some fruits for him. (Here, the verb ‘bought’ is the past form of the verb ‘buy’)

They invited me last night on their party. (Here, the verb ‘invited’ is in past form of the verb ‘invite’ and the phrase ‘last night’ is the past marker.

So, always remember that a sentence in past indefinite can be recognized in 2 ways. One is the past form of the verb and another one is the use of past tense marker phrases in a sentence. I hope you have understood that it’s too much easier to recognize a past sentence in a paragraph, report, or essay.

Simple Past Tense Structure

A sentence in simple past tense will always have either the past form of the principal verb or past form of the verb with a past tense marker phrase in its structure. This is the major sign of recognizing the tense of a sentence in English language. So, please note:

(Past form of verb) or (Past form of verb+ Past tense marker phrases)

Structure: Subject + Past form of verb + Object + Extension/ Past tense marker phrase

Examples: Mr. Rahman gave me a pen. Mr. Rahman gave me a pen yesterday .

Remember, there is no obligation in case of using ‘past tense marker phrases’. A sentence with only a ‘past form of verb’ is past simple tense or past indefinite tense. When you will go for long sentences, there will come ‘past tense marker phrases’ to indicate exact time in the past.

So, in order to write sentences in simple past tense, you have memorize the ‘past forms of the verbs’ and the list of the ‘past tense marker phrases’.

Now, we will learn the negative and interrogative structures of past indefinite tense. When you will write a past sentence in negative or interrogative form, the auxiliary verb “did” will be used. The one and only auxiliary verb of past indefinite tense is ‘did’ .

When and How to Use ‘Did’ in Past Tense?

An Interesting Fact about ‘Did’!

There is an interesting function of the auxiliary verb ‘did’ . The auxiliary verb “did” is the past form of the verb “do”. You have already learnt that the form of verb will be always “past” in case of past indefinite tense.

But when you will express a past action in negative or interrogative form, you have to use the auxiliary verb ‘did”

But wait… we learnt that there will be a past verb in a past indefinite tense. So, if we add ‘did’, it makes two verbs in a sentence and both are in past form.

Can we use two past verbs in a single sentence? No, we can’t. There will be always a single past verb in a past sentence.

So, what’s the solution? The solution is having the auxiliary verb ‘did’ as a past verb and convert the form of the main verb into present form. Whenever ‘did’ will come in a sentence, the main verb will be converted into present form from the past.

Have a look on these examples: Mr. Rahman gave me a pen yesterday. Negative: Mr. Rahman did not give me a pen yesterday. Interrogative: Did Mr. Rahman give me a pen yesterday?

So, you can see how the main verb is getting back to present form as soon as ‘did’ is added. So, the structures are:

Negative Structure:

Subject + did not + present form of main verb + object + extension.

Example: Negative: Mr. Rahman did not give me a pen yesterday.

NOTE: Here, the auxiliary verb ‘did’ is used and this is why the form of main verb is changed from ‘gave’ to ‘give’ .

Interrogative Structure:

Did + Subject + present form of main verb + object + extension?

Example: Interrogative: Did Mr. Rahman give me a pen yesterday?

Using ‘did’ and not changing the form of the main verb into present is one of the top mistakes in the world, people do, according to the statistics of ” OXFORD English Learners ” and ” Cambridge English publication ” So, be careful about this.

4 Rules of Past Indefinite Tense

Now, we will learn about the variations of past indefinite tense and how they work.

Rule 01 – Past Indefinite Tense Marker Words & Phrases

There are some certain phrases or words in English language which are considered as the past tense markers because they indicate a past moment of an action or event. If you memorize these words or phrases properly, you will be able to identify the time of an action or event.

This small chart of these words/phrases will also help you to solve the fill in the blanks questions in your academic exams.

Past Tense Marker Words & Phrase Chart

Example: We came here last night with our relatives. Long time ago , i went there with my friends. I won the first prize in 2015.

Rule 02 – Habit / Regular Action or Event of Past Moments

Generally, we express a past event or action in simple past tense where we basically use past form of the main verb. But, there are a few actions or events in our past life which are considered as habits of past instead of normal action.

If we want to express any habit of our past life, we must use a different form of verb (used to/would+ base form of verb) in it. You can use one of these two modal verbs: ‘used to’ or ‘would’ .

Examples: I used to/would swim in this river. NOTE: Here, the use of the modal auxiliary verb- ‘used to/would’ indicates that I regularly swam in this river in past days of my life. It was a regular habit of past but I do not swim in this river anymore.

He used to/would play cricket in this field in his childhood. (In his childhood, ‘playing cricket’ in this field was his daily action of life. But many years have passed. And now it is only in memories.)

Rule 03 – Formal Request or Official Expression

If you want to request someone for something or pray for permission at present, you simply can use the modal verb ‘can/may/will’ at the starting of the sentence. But if you want to make the request more formal or want to express it officially, you must use the modal verb- ‘would or could’ at the starting of the question.

Though the modal verb- ‘would and could’ are in past forms but the meaning of the sentences do not indicate past action or event. They express deep gratitude or politeness . The expression and meaning of these sentences are present here. Besides, please note that the verb ‘would’ is more formal than the verb ‘could’ .

Examples: Would you give me a pen please? (Formal expression) Could you shut the window now? (Semi-formal expression)

Rule 04 – Any Past Duty or Obligation

Sometime, we indicate any past duty or obligation . But we do not do that work now. Besides, it was not our past regular habit. In such cases, we will use the structure: (was to/were to+ base form of verb) in the place of verb.

Example: I was to go to Dhaka to bring the books. He was to water in the garden daily afternoon.

Usages & Examples of Simple Past Tense in Practical Life

Now here are some situations or cases where we should use simple past tense normally.

01 – Any general action or event of past will be written or spoken using the structure of past indefinite tense.

Example: I gave him a nice bag on his last birthday. My friend broke your glass during drinking water yesterday .

02 – Any fairy story or general history should be expressed in past indefinite tense.

Example: The king ordered the boy to tell the truth. Jerry helped the writer to collect woods.

So, these are all about the structures, rules, and usages of Past Indefinite Tense in English language. It’s one of the most used tenses among all tenses in English grammar.

In case of writing any composition based on the past event or action, past indefinite tense is the only tense, you have to use in sentence structure. Besides, to understand the important grammatical lesson- ‘ Tag Questions ‘, you must learn this tense.

After reading this lesson, you can move to next lesson of tense: Future Indefinite

Now try to use this tense in your daily assignments and let us know about your thoughts on this lesson: ‘Past Indefinite Tense’ using the comment box below. Last of all, share this lesson with your friends or classmates to help them learn simple past tense with rules and examples.

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50 Sentences of Past Indefinite Tense Examples

The past indefinite tense, also known as the simple past tense, is used to describe actions or events that occurred in the past and are no longer ongoing. It is formed by adding “-ed” to regular verbs or using the past form of irregular verbs. For example, “She walked to the store yesterday.”

Let’s see Sentences of Past Indefinite Tense with examples:

Affirmative

Interrogative, sentences of past indefinite tense examples.

I visited the museum yesterday.
She bought a new car last week.
He completed his assignment on time.
They watched a movie on Saturday.
We celebrated his birthday with a party.
The sun shone brightly all day.
Maria cooked a delicious dinner.
John graduated from college in 2020.
The cat chased a mouse.
Sarah read a fascinating book.
Tom fixed the leaky faucet.
The children played in the park.
My parents traveled to Europe last summer.
We finished the project ahead of schedule.
Lisa cleaned her room yesterday.
The company launched a new product.
James won the chess tournament.
The rain stopped suddenly.
I saw an old friend at the store.
The dog barked loudly.
They visited the Grand Canyon.
She wrote a heartfelt letter.
He built a treehouse for his kids.
The team scored a winning goal.
We hiked in the mountains last summer.
Mary painted a beautiful picture.
The movie started at 7 PM.
I met my favorite author.
The flowers blossomed in the spring.
He arrived on time for the meeting.
I didn’t enjoy the concert last night.
She didn’t pass her driving test on the first try.
They didn’t visit their grandparents last weekend.
He didn’t complete his homework on time.
The team didn’t win the championship last year.
Jane didn’t like the movie we watched last week.
We didn’t have a great time at the party.
The restaurant didn’t serve good food.
I didn’t receive the package yesterday.
Tom didn’t attend the meeting this morning.
Did you visit the museum last weekend?
Where did she go for her vacation?
What happened at the party last night?
Who won the game yesterday?
When did they start their journey?
Why did he quit his job?
How did they meet each other?
Did you enjoy the concert on Saturday?
What time did the movie end?
Did your parents travel to Europe last summer?

50 Sentences of Past Indefinite Tense Examples

50 Sentences of Present Perfect Continuous Tense Examples

50 sentences of past continuous tense examples.

GrammarSimple.Com

Past indefinite tense, definition, rules and example sentences.

Past Indefinite Tense, Definition and Example Sentences

Table of Contents

Past Indefinite Tense

While the “indefinite tense” is a category of the verb tense, it covers simple past tense, simple present tense and simple future tense. The three indefinite tenses represent usual activities and realities. Unlike other tenses, indefinite tenses describe actions without specifically specifying whether the verbs are complete. Indefinite tenses are more commonly referred to as simple tenses. The term “indefinite” is not used very often, especially when talking about individual uncertain times. This is why we used the term “simple” when talking about three indefinite tenses.

The Indefinite Tense in the Past

The indefinite aspect.

The term indefinite direction is used to group all actions at indefinite times. These verbs are past tense, present tense, and future tense. It should be noted here that the appearance of the action is determined by whether the verb expresses a fact, an ongoing action, or an incomplete action. Actions of indefinite dimensions express facts.

Why Are Indefinite Aspect Important?

Native English speakers can use all tenses without thinking twice about grammar. In addition, if you are teaching or learning English, you need to spend time learning tenses because expressing when something happens is a very basic communication skill. Simple tenses are generally the first tenses to be taught or learned. However, as we mentioned, they are not very simple and are not used very often during a natural dialogue. We must remember that tenses do not tell us whether something is a past, present, or future verb. They also tell us whether the action is in a habitual, completed, or ongoing state.

Common Regular Verbs in the Past Tense

In the table below, we have listed the past tense and negative forms of some of the frequently used regular verbs.

Common Irregular Verbs in the Past Tense

We have listed the past tense and negative forms of frequently used irregular verbs in the table below.

Past Indefinite Tense Example Sentences

Years ago, when I was young, I used to listen to this music often.

This video game must be very old, we used to play it with my brother when I was little.

This product was made in Japan I guess.

I remember our old Christmas times, we were pretty spoiled kids.

We used to be pure-hearted people, too, life conditions made us this way.

In the past, years ago, we had a greengrocer here.

Once upon a time, our ancestors gave great struggles for these lands.

Present Continuous Tense Table, Affirmative, Negative, Interrogative

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About the author.

Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets and Exercises with Answers

25 Sentences using Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets. How to use Past Indefinite Tense in Sentences.

Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets are essential for anyone trying to learn about simple past actions in English. These worksheets make it easier to understand and use the past tense properly. They provide clear examples and practice activities that help learners understand how to talk about things that happened before now. With these worksheets, students can build a strong foundation in English grammar, making it simpler to share past stories and events clearly. If you’re looking to improve your understanding of the past indefinite tense , these worksheets are a helpful starting point.

Table of Contents

Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets

Worksheet 1:fill in the blanks with appropriate form of the verb given in the brackets..

She __________ (read) the book yesterday.
They __________ (play) soccer after school.
He __________ (visit) his grandparents last weekend.
We __________ (eat) dinner at the restaurant.
I __________ (watch) a movie last night.
She __________ (write) a letter to her friend.
He __________ (study) for the exam all day.
They __________ (travel) to Europe last summer.
The cat __________ (catch) a mouse in the garden.
We __________ (meet) our friends at the party.
He __________ (fix) the broken car yesterday.
She __________ (dance) at the party.
They __________ (buy) a new house last year.
I __________ (swim) in the ocean yesterday.
He __________ (visit) the museum with his family.
She __________ (bake) a delicious cake for the celebration.
We __________ (take) a trip to the mountains.
They __________ (clean) the entire house.
He __________ (run) a marathon last month.
She __________ (paint) a beautiful picture.
I __________ (play) the piano at the concert.
They __________ (plant) flowers in the garden.
He __________ (fix) the computer issue.
She __________ (sing) her favorite song on stage.
We __________ (visit) the zoo yesterday.

Scroll down to See Answers

15+Sentences of Present Indefinite Tense Worksheet. How to use Present Indefinite Tense in Sentences.

Worksheet 2:Rewrite Sentences in Negative and Interrogative form.

He completed his project on time.

He did not complete his project on time.
Did he complete his project on time?

They went to the beach for vacation.

They did not go to the beach for vacation.
Did they go to the beach for vacation?

We celebrated his birthday with a surprise party.

We did not celebrate his birthday with a surprise party.
Did we celebrate his birthday with a surprise party?

She cooked a delicious meal for her family yesterday.

he did not cook a delicious meal for her family yesterday.
Did she cook a delicious meal for her family yesterday?

They bought a new car after saving for years.

They did not buy a new car after saving for years.
Did they buy a new car after saving for years?

Negative and Interrogative form of Past Indefinite Tense. How to make Negative and Interrogative of Past Indefinite Tense.

Answers of Worksheet 1:

100 Examples of Collective Nouns
Present Indefinite Tense Worksheets
Active And Passive Voice With Rules
100 Present Indefinite Tense

15+Sentences of past Indefinite Tense Worksheet Interrogative of past Indefinite Tense Worksheets Negative of past Indefinite Tense Worksheets Past Indefinite Tense Exercises past Indefinite Tense Interrogative form Worksheet past Indefinite Tense Negative form Worksheet past Indefinite Tense Worksheets Past Tense Exercises Past Tense Worksheets Worksheets of past Indefinite Tense

Present Continuous Tense Worksheets and Exercises with Answers

Simple Present Tense with Examples, Definition, Structure, Rules, Times Words, and Usages

Simple Present Tense With Examples, Rules, Usage

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Indefinite Tenses

What are the indefinite tenses.

Table of Contents

The Role of the Indefinite Tenses

Examples of verbs in the indefinite tenses, forming verbs in the indefinite tenses, the indefinite tenses in the past, present, and future, the "indefinite aspect", interactive verb conjugation tables, why indefinite tenses are important.

The Simple Past Tense

She played.

The Simple Present Tense

The Simple Future Tense

She will go.
They will understand.

In the Past Tense

I played chess.
They played chess.

In the Present Tense

I play chess.
They play chess.

In the Future Tense

I will play chess.
They will play chess.

Forming the Simple Past Tense (for most verbs)

They danced.

Forming the Simple Present Tense (for most verbs)

Forming the Simple Future Tense

He will play.

Top 10 Regular Verbs

Top 10 Irregular Verbs

All 4 Past Tenses

All 4 Present Tenses

All 4 Future Tenses

The verb " to be " in all its forms ( am , is , are , was , were , will be )
The verb " to have " in all its forms ( has , have , had , will have )
Present participles , i.e., the "ing" form of verbs (e.g., playing , thinking , eating )
Past participles (e.g., played , thought , eaten )
Learning or teaching English? Get your head in those verb tables!

This page was written by Craig Shrives .

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Examples of Past Indefinite Tense

In This Blog We Will Discuss

100 Examples of Past Indefinite Tense

Here, we are sharing lots of examples of Past Indefinite Tense sentences that will help every level of students to understand the structure of this tense. It will be easier to practice with these examples.

• She was the most important person in my life.

• We played cricket in this field.

• I ate a mango.

• Jesus was the best human of his time.

• She enjoyed the whole movie.

• I loved that movie.

• They loved visiting my place.

• She went to Delhi and never came back.

• I was the dumbest in the class.

• He loved her but never expressed.

• He helped me a lot to do my homework.

• I went to a book fair with my father.

• My mother went to her office.

• I didn’t attend the class yesterday.

• She wrote a romantic poem for me.

• The whole school went for a picnic in Agra.

• She ate ice-cream.

• Mr. Varun made a change in the school.

• She made the cake for me.

• I cooked food in the hostel.

• I learned English.

• She went to school.

• She paid for the money.

• I rang the bell.

• He ran away.

• She said to stay.

• I saw a bird.

• Varun showed me a beautiful girl.

• She slept the whole night.

• I sang beautiful songs.

• He spent time with me.

• I told him to come.

• Mr. Das taught us English.

• I thought it perfectly.

• Bangladesh won the cricket match.

• I didn’t understand the lesson.

• He wrote a letter to me.

• They wore a school uniform.

• I swam the river.

• I spoke the truth.

• She was absent in the class.

• The principal admired me.

• She admitted her guilt.

• He advised me to study more.

• I apologized for my mistake.

• She allowed me to enter her house.

• I acted as a brilliant guy.

• She appeared suddenly.

• I approved her new look for the drama.

• She applied for a job.

• People applauded for me.

• He argued a lot.

• They arranged a big program.

• He asked a few questions.

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A Complete Guide to the Past Tenses

Posted by David S. Wills | Sep 29, 2017 | Grammar | 0

Introduction

In this previous article , we briefly looked at what verb tenses are and then explored the present tenses of the English language. In this chapter, we will look into the past tenses.

As with the present, there are four aspects to the past tense in English, and each can be divided into positive, negative, and question forms. They look like this:

Let’s look at each tense in turn.

Past Simple

This is a really common and basic part of the English language, and knowledge of it is essential to IELTS success . Generally speaking, we form the past simple by adding “-ed” to a verb. However, in English there are hundreds of irregular verbs . So, whereas you might say “I walked” or “She watched,” there are also cases like “We ate” or “They wrote” for which you simply need to remember the correct past form. Here is an example using an irregular verb:

When to Use Past Simple

I graduated in 2007.
She left home two years ago.
We called her every day.
He spoke with his grandmother often.

Past Continuous

Like the present continuous, the past continuous is formed using “to be” with “verb+ing”. However, as this is a past tense, “to be” is changed into the past (“was” or “were”) while the present participle (“verb+ing”) remains.

When to Use Past Continuous

There are three uses that all suggest an act that was ongoing for a period of time.

We were walking our dogs last night.
I was brushing my teeth at ten o’clock.
I was washing the dishes when I cut my hand.
She was driving to work when the accident happened.
They were listening to music when the doorbell rang.
It was sleeping when the fireworks started.

Past Perfect

While the present perfect uses “has” or “have,” the past perfect simply uses “had” before the past participle of the main verb.

When to Use Past Perfect

The past perfect is used to refer to an event or action that took place prior to the time period considered. Therefore, in the examples above, the conversation would revolve around an event that took place in the past, but the eating took place before that. For example:

A: Do you remember last year when we first arrived at the hotel? B: Yes, I remember. Oddly enough, I recall being very hungry! A: Well, you had not eaten for hours.

In this case, we use the past perfect to show that the eating took place (or in this case, didn’t take place) before the arrival at the hotel.

Here are some more related uses:

We had lived in that house for six years.
By then, they had studied for a long time.
I wasn’t afraid because I had expected the worst.
He felt confident because he had already prepared.

You can learn about the difference between the past perfect and present perfect tenses here .

Past Perfect Continuous

The past perfect continuous is essentially the same as the present perfect continuous except that the point of reference is in the past.

When to Use Past Perfect Continuous

This tense describes an action that occurred further back in time than the other events, but that overlaps them.

They had been studying for several hours when the phone rang.
She had been working in a hospital before the war began.

Past Tenses for IELTS Writing Task 1

Not only is the past simple incredibly common in everyday speech, but it is also very useful for the writing exam. In particular, in task 1 you will mostly be using the past simple to describe details in a line graph or table because they will likely feature dates that are from the past. Here are some examples:

Prices rose in the first quarter.
The interest rate went up between 1999 and 2001.
French people consumed more wine than Italian people during the period.
In 1860, the population stood at four million.

You may also use the past perfect in order to explain relationships between points in time with greater clarity. As we discussed previously in the past perfect section, this tense shows an action that occurred prior to another action in the past. Here are some examples:

After it had risen to forty-six, the total volume then dropped to thirty-eight.
Sales returned to a higher level after they had fallen to just six thousand.

The other past tenses are not particularly useful in the IELTS writing exam , but can greatly improve the accuracy of your overall English. Therefore, they may come in useful for other parts of the IELTS exam.

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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Past Tense - Meaning, Definition, Structure and Types with Examples

As human beings, we love to speak about what goes on in our lives. In order to be able to express what has happened, you should know how to use the past tense. This article will help you with what you need to know about past tense, its meaning, definition and types. Check out the examples and past tense verbs list to have a clear understanding of how it works.

Definition of past tense, types of past tense, structure of past tense, list of past tense verbs, frequently asked questions on past tense in english, what is past tense.

The ‘past tense’ form of a verb , as the term suggests, can be used to speak about or represent an event or action that already happened in the past. One important point you have to keep in mind is that a number of verbs, when used in the past tense, do not follow the general rule of adding ‘ed’ to the end of the verb to form the past tense. Take a look at the different definitions of past tense and the list of past tense verbs to develop a clear idea of the same.

“A verb tense expressing action or state in or as if in the past”, is the definition of past tense, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The Macmillan Dictionary defines ‘past tense’ as “the forms of a verb group indicating that an action or event happened regularly, or that a situation existed or was true during a period before now.”

The past tense has four different forms to indicate the varied nature of actions that happened in the past. They are:

Simple Past Tense – used to indicate an action or event that happened in the past.
Past Continuous Tense – used to depict an action or event that was continuing in the past.
Past Perfect Tense – used to represent an event or action that happened in the past before another event or action that happened in the past.
Past Perfect Continuous Tense – used to denote an action or event that was taking place in the past until another action or event happened in the past.

In order to understand the structure of the past tense, take a look at the following table.

It would be even better if you also learn how the structure of a sentence using the past tense form of the verb changes when used in the positive, negative, interrogative or negative interrogative formats.

Examples of Past Tense

Given below are a few examples to show you how the past tense works.

Marcel finished his speech.
Did they go to the hospital?
Nandhini and Padmini were talking about you.
Salim had found the keys before his parents found out about it.
Selena found out that Trinita had not been taking her medicines for the last few weeks.
Didn’t you know about his accident?

Take a look at the following table of past tense verbs with the past and past participle forms that you can refer to when you are using the past tense.

You can refer to the article on irregular verbs for an extensive list of verbs and their past forms.

What is the past tense?

The ‘past tense’ form of a verb, as the term suggests, can be used to speak about or represent an event or action that already happened in the past. One important point you have to keep in mind is that a number of verbs, when used in the past tense, do not follow the general rule of adding ‘ed’ to the end of the verb to form the past tense.

What is the definition of past tense?

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines the term ‘past tense’ as “the form of a verb used to describe actions in the past.” According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the past tense form of the verb is “used to describe verb forms in many languages used for actions that have now finished.” “A verb tense expressing action or state in or as if in the past”, is the definition of past tense, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The Macmillan Dictionary defines ‘past tense’ as “the forms of a verb group indicating that an action or event happened regularly, or that a situation existed or was true during a period before now.”

What are the different types of past tense?

The past tense can be seen to have four different forms namely,

Simple Past Tense
Past Continuous Tense
Past Perfect Tense
Past Perfect Continuous Tense

Give a few examples of past tense.

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Past Indefinite Tense Exercise with Answers in English (PDF)

(Simple) Past Indefinite Tense Exercise ( Download PDF ) – We have given three different exercises to practice which will help them to have a better understanding of Past Indefinite Tense. These exercises are designed so that students of other classes can practice them.

Having answers for each exercise can help students check the answers they have done. We have prepared Past indefinite Tense Exercise with Answers which will help the students to understand the sentences when they make mistakes.

These following exercises can be solved by students of any class or board. So, let’s look at these exercises and find out how many students can answer them correctly.

Past Indefinite Tense Exercise

Exercise -1

Fill in the blanks with appropriate past indefinite verbs from the given brackets.

1. We ____ a good work. ( do )

2. Ram ____ cricket. ( play )

3. Neha ____ for his dance performance. ( practice )

4. My mother ____ food for you. ( cook )

5. You _____ to watch a movie at PVR. ( go )

6. He ____ at the function. ( sing )

7. My teacher ____ in the classroom. ( teach )

8. Rohan ___ a guitar at home. ( play )

9. I ____ a motivational storybook. ( read )

10. A women ____ a car on the road. ( ride )

11. A Girl ___ at everyone at the party. ( look )

12. She ___ like a beggar on the road. ( beg )

13. Our mother ____ the poor. ( help )

14. Peter ___ them. ( insult )

15. Komal ___ her homework. ( complete )

1. We did good work.

2. Ram played cricket.

3. Neha practiced for his dance performance.

4. My mother cooked food for you.

5. You went to watch a movie at PVR.

6. He sang at the function.

7. My teacher taught in the classroom.

8. Rohan played the guitar at home.

9. I read a motivational storybook.

10. A woman rode a car on the road.

11. A Girl looked at everyone at the party.

12. She begged like a beggar on the road.

13. Our mother helped the poor.

14. Peter insulted them.

15. Komal completed her homework.

Exercise – 2

Change all the sentences given below into the Past indefinite tense.

1. She buys a new car.

2. He is going to play in the park.

3. Peter is playing guitar.

4. I do my homework.

5. Rohan will drive a car.

6. Fever has affected our bodies.

7. You are eating a mango at the market.

8. Our principal visits the school.

9. Peter was reading this book.

10. You are singing beautifully at the party.

11. You were leaving for Delhi.

12. She will clean her room.

13. You are going to read books in the library.

14. Peter is speaking fluent English.

1. She bought a new car.

2. He went to play in the park.

3. Peter played guitar.

4. I did my homework.

5. Rohan drove a car.

6. Fever affected our bodies.

7. You ate a mango at the market.

8. Our principal visited the school.

9. Peter read this book.

10. You sang beautifully at the party.

11. You left for Delhi.

12. She cleaned her room.

13. You went to read books in the library.

14. Peter spoke fluent English.

Exercise – 3

Change the sentences given below appropriately as instructed in the brackets

• Did you play cricket? (change to affirmative)

• Ram did not come. (change to affirmative)

• We waited for the bus. (change to negative)

• We did not behave like a fool. (change to interrogative)

• You did not confuse me. (change to affirmative)

• She left now. (change to interrogative)

• He earned now. (change to negative)

• did you feel very much better today? (change to affirmative)

• She told the truth. (change to negative)

• did he earn now? (change to affirmative)

• We learned English. (change to negative)

Download PDF – Click Here

You can check your all answers with these given solutions by easily solving the exercises. All these Past indefinite Tense Exercise will help you to understand it.

Future Continuous Tense in English (Rules, Formula) PDF

Future Continuous Tense Exercises with Answers in English (PDF)

Past Perfect Continuous Tense (Rules, Formula, Examples) PDF

Past Perfect Tense Exercises with Answers in English (PDF)

Daily Routines – Past Tense

List of Daily Routines in the Past Simple Tense in English

(You can hear the pronunciation of each daily routine in the video)

I turned off my alarm
I took a shower / I had a shower
I got dressed
I combed my hair
I made breakfast
I ate breakfast / I had breakfast
I brushed my teeth
I went to work
I started work at 9
I answered emails
I ate lunch / I had lunch
I worked on my computer
I finished work at 5
I went home
I arrived home
I fed the dog
I cooked dinner
I ate dinner / I had dinner
I watched TV
I read a book
I went to bed
I fell asleep

Daily routines for School

I went to school
I had classes
I finished school at 3
I did my homework

Notice how in this lesson all of these phrases are in the past simple tense and have I (first person singular) as the subject.

Practice Exercises

Video practice: At the end of the video there is a practice exercise where a cartoon of a daily routine appears on the screen. There are also three phrases in the past tense next to the cartoon and you must choose which phrase best describes that activity. The answer will appear after 5 seconds (approximately).

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Narration Change in Past Tense

Back to: Direct and Indirect Speech (Narration)

Examples of narration change in simple past, past continuous, past perfect, past perfect continuous are given below –

Table of Contents

Direct and Indirect Speech Simple Past Tense Examples

If reported verb is in Past Tense, reported speech will change from Past Indefinite Tense to Past Perfect Tense .

Examples of Direct and Indirect Speech in Past Continuous Tense

If reported verb is in Past Tense, reported speech will change from Past Continuous Tense to Past Perfect Continuous Tense .

Direct and Indirect Speech Past Perfect Tense Examples

If reported verb is in Past Tense & reported speech is in Past Perfect Tense , it will not change. e.g.

Direct and Indirect Speech Past Perfect Continuous Tense Examples

If reported verb is in Past Tense & reported speech is in Past Perfect Continuous Tense , it will not change. e.g.

An underappreciated era in Black literature gets its due

Harvard scholar jesse mccarthy shines new light on revelatory books published in the middle of the 20th century..

Vincent O. Carter, one of the midcentury authors whose work is explored in “The Blue Period."

L ately, in English departments the idea of grouping works of literature by when they were written has started to feel outdated, or at least old-fashioned. This might sound odd since the field is organized around such literary periods, with historical labels like “Victorian” or “Modernist” defining its conferences, course titles, journals, and job listings. But some professors now see such categories as blunt and tired. One even wrote a book called “ Why Literary Periods Mattered ,” past tense.

Which makes it rather surprising that a young star professor in Harvard’s English department has written a new book defending literary periodization — and proposing a new period of his own.

In “The Blue Period,” Jesse McCarthy zooms in on Black authors who lived and wrote between 1945 and 1965. During these decades, roughly the first half of the Cold War, most of the world sided with either America or the Soviet Union. But many Black Americans felt torn. “What is so distinctive, compelling, and politically potent about black writing from this era,” McCarthy writes, “is its dissent from both of the hegemonic Cold War ideological blocks.” Instead of turning toward Washington or Moscow, Black authors turned inward. Alongside Black painters and Black musicians, they produced ambiguous and emotional art that McCarthy calls “blue.”

It’s an exciting new window into well-known writers like Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks, and it offers a chance to rediscover forgotten figures like Vincent O. Carter. It’s also a reminder that in our own period — one marked by distraction and information and a reflexive obsession with the present — the quaint act of thinking historically, of thinking periodically, remains valuable, even radical.

Thanks to some wonderful authors and some diligent academics, modern Black literature now feels rich with periodization. There’s Toni Morrison, who looms as a period unto herself. There are current writers like Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead, who extend and revise Morrison’s historical approach. Moving backward, there’s the Black Arts Movement, with writers like Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and the Harlem Renaissance, with writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

But what about the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement? McCarthy found himself pondering those missing decades one day when he was a graduate student at Princeton, browsing the library shelves.

It started when McCarthy pulled down a copy of Vincent O. Carter’s obscure and experimental memoir “The Bern Book,” a striking volume with its cover illustration of a single piercing eye. “I was immediately intrigued,” McCarthy says.

Part of this intrigue was the unknown author and the brilliant prose, and part of it was that McCarthy didn’t know how to contextualize this fascinating book. “We didn’t really have a sense of who Carter was, how to read his books, why they mattered, how they fit into the field,” McCarthy says. What he needed as a reader, and what Carter needed as an author, was an interpretive framework: a literary period.

“The Blue Period” sketches this framework, often through the words of the authors themselves. In 1948, spon after he’d emigrated to Paris, Richard Wright published an essay on the front page of a French newspaper. “My body was born in America,” Wright wrote. “My heart was born in Russia; and today I stand contritely ashamed between my two parent countries.”

Many Black intellectuals shared Wright’s alienation. On one side, there was the version of communism that had once energized them — but also Stalin and his brutal assault on freedom. On the other side, there was America and its avowed liberalism — but also the reality lived by so many Black people of Jim Crow and its brutal assault on freedom.

To Wright, both sides deserved blame: “The present nationalism, in America and in Russia, forces a man to abandon his human heritage.” But Wright also believed Black people could carve out a refuge from the dominant national politics, an interior space to discuss their feelings and fears and desires. “Our weapons are not their weapons,” Wright wrote. “For us there still exists room for liberty, and that room is your spirit and mine.”

The weapon many writers chose was a “blue” style, an adjective McCarthy borrows from Miles Davis and several of his 1950s albums, including “Kind of Blue.” “Davis would turn his back to the audience when he performed,” McCarthy says. Then he would play music that was intense, meditative, and inwardly focused — music that was reserved but still fiery.

“When I think of Black life in the 1950s,” McCarthy says, “it has this kind of sound.”

Once McCarthy understood the political dynamic and the aesthetic response to it, he began to see examples everywhere. Take Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Critics have often read the novel as Ellison’s turn from communism toward liberalism. But McCarthy believes this reading is too simple. “Ellison sees Black people being instrumentalized by both sides,” he says. “Invisible Man” doesn’t end with the main character choosing a team. It ends with him retreating to his books and jazz records — with him turning his back to the audience and adopting a blue style.

One benefit of a literary period is that it can cast major figures in a fresh light. Another is that it can elevate minor figures. Vincent O. Carter is a good example. Although he wrote “The Bern Book” near the start of the blue period, in the ’50s, he couldn’t find a publisher until 1973. “By then it was the height of the Black Arts Movement,” McCarthy says, referring to the decade-long period of overtly political Black writing. “No one wanted this kind of book from a Black writer.” “The Bern Book” describes leaving America and ultimately settling in rural Switzerland. “Carter meditates on what Blackness means,” McCarthy says, “especially in the heart of Europe.” For his next book, “Such Sweet Thunder,” a novel centered on a Black working-class neighborhood that will be erased by an Eisenhower interstate, Carter couldn’t find any publisher at all. It appeared in 2003, two decades after his death.

By restoring both Carter titles to the 1950s, when they were largely written, McCarthy can argue for their importance and illuminate their themes.

Perhaps the best benefit of a literary period, though, is the way it connects authors major and minor. “The Bern Book” makes a fascinating counterpoint to “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin’s classic essay on his own time living in Switzerland. Why did Baldwin leave? Why did Carter stay, ultimately for 30 years? How did each author try to carve out space for Black interiority and emotion? Reading Carter and Baldwin alongside each other as works of the same literary period, and realizing that the authors were pursuing similar goals at similar times, enriches our understanding of them both.

In 1959, Baldwin wrote another important essay, which echoed Wright’s frustrations with the Cold War. “The world has shrunk to the size of several ignorant armies,” Baldwin wrote. The problem was he didn’t know which army was right: “I share, for example, the ideals of the West — freedom, justice, brotherhood — but I cannot say that I have often seen these honored.”

McCarthy hopes literary connections like these, so persuasively laid out in “The Blue Period,” will give scholars and students new approaches to Black writers of the 1950s and 1960s. At Harvard, he wants to teach a class that will focus on a number of blue texts. “If you’re teaching a whole class instead of a survey,” he says, “then in addition to Baldwin and Ellison you can assign, say, ‘Brown Girl, Brownstones’” — a 1959 novel by Paule Marshall about a family of immigrants with a fierce emotional life. Bookworms can do the same thing at home, pairing Marshall with Gwendolyn Brooks or Carter with Baldwin.

In addition to making a case for the blue period, McCarthy wants to advocate for a certain style of reading and thinking. “My students are extremely bright,” he says. “In many ways they know more than I did when I was in college, and if they don’t know something, they can look it up.” But sometimes he wonders if this information has become not just a crutch but an obstacle. “They don’t always know where all of this information fits in an actual trajectory,” he says. “They struggle to think historically.”

Thinking historically matters for any subject, but it especially matters for someone trying to understand the Black experience in America. As McCarthy writes in his book, “mores and political attitudes, fashion and taste, idiom and vocabulary — most notoriously the very words black people use to describe themselves — what it means to and how it feels to be black in the modern world have swung wildly.”

The swings and breaks of the past often provide its most revealing moments — but also the ones that are easiest to misinterpret or simply to forget. This is where thinking periodically can help.

Craig Fehrman is a journalist and historian. He is at work on a revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition for Simon & Schuster.

A photo of Brittney Griner looking directly at the camera.

‘I Will Never Forget Any of It’: Brittney Griner Is Ready to Talk

In an interview, the basketball star reveals her humiliation — and friendships — in Russian prison, and her path to recovery.

Credit... Mickalene Thomas for The New York Times

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By J Wortham

J Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine. They interviewed the basketball star over a weekend in Phoenix, Ariz.

May 2, 2024

On the March afternoon when I met Brittney Griner in Phoenix, the wildflowers were in peak efflorescence, California poppies and violet cones of lupine exploding everywhere. Griner was in bloom too. She was practicing with some local ballers brought in by her W.N.B.A. team, the Mercury, to prepare its players for the start of the season in May. On the court, Griner was loose, confident, trading jokes with the other players between runs. She snatched a pass out of the air, drove it hard in the paint and pulled up to shoot, the ball kissing the net as it sailed through. Everyone, including Nate Tibbetts, the Mercury’s newly hired head coach, who dropped by to watch, erupted in cheers. Griner nodded to herself in quiet satisfaction, keeping her head down as she jogged back to run the play again.

Listen to this article, read by January LaVoy

Less than two years ago, Griner was starting her nine-year sentence in a penal colony in Russia, sewing uniforms for the Russian military and subsisting on spoiled food. She lived for glimpses of the sky, which she could see only through weathered rebar when the guards took prisoners outside. She had never been further from the sport that made her a household name. She could barely get through multiple rounds of horse, her lung capacity shot from smoking so many cigarettes. She rarely got to hear from her wife, Cherelle, or her family and friends, and she had no idea when — or if — she would be coming home.

When, after 10 months in Russia, she was finally released, she jumped back into playing, thinking the routine and familiarity would ground her back in herself and her life. But the transition was rocky. All last season, she was plagued by injuries and insecurities. The confidence of being one of the W.N.B.A.’s most powerful “bigs” had evaporated. It got so bad that she took a midseason leave. “I don’t feel like I really got my body back until right now,” she told me in Phoenix. “When I look back at the videos, it’s cringe. The season, any pictures from last year — I don’t want to see it or look at it.” She had a lot of self-doubt and didn’t think she could do it. “Maybe I should stop. Maybe I’ll never be the same player that I was before. Maybe this was the big rift in my career, where it’s like, I’m never going to get to that top.”

The next day, Griner loped into a conference room above the court, wearing team-branded workout clothes and an elegant chain, dimples prominent in her wide grin. Her teeth were perfect — her first big purchase after going pro. She was gracious and kind, offering to retrieve drinks from the team fridge, making sure everyone around her was comfortable, taking her seat last. “I actually feel like my old self,” she told me. “I’m moving like my old self. But still, in the back of my head, there’s a nagging ‘What if?’ You know, what if it doesn’t go the way you want it to?”

Griner standing courtside before a Phoenix Mercury game.

On May 7, Griner will publish her memoir “Coming Home,” written with Michelle Burford, documenting her harrowing ordeal in Russia and her return home. The book is brutal, rendering in excruciating detail the conditions of her imprisonment and the fear and desperation that consumed her daily. Griner has always relied on writing for her sanity, starting in middle school, when she endured bullying for her height and androgynous appearance, and this memoir reveals someone deeply familiar with her interiority — she’s vulnerable and raw but has also had enough therapy to use humor to process tragedy. In Russia, she journaled in the margins of her Bible and a Sudoku book, but the details are also seared in her mind. “I will never forget any of it,” she told me, enunciating each word to make her point.

As we talked, Griner did her best to arrange her 6-foot-9 frame into a low-slung leather chair. She initiated our conversation by asking what hair products I used: Her curls, she confided, have been in recovery, too. When images of Griner were broadcast around the world with her long locs shorn, it seemed like an indication of the cruelty she was enduring. But Griner told me that cutting her hair was actually a rare moment of agency during her imprisonment. Her locs were always damp. There was no hair dryer, and her hair never fully dried after a shower. All the women were forced outside to exercise, she recalled, despite freezing temperatures and snow. The prison was barely heated, and she worried she would catch pneumonia. She decided to cut her locs off. “The cut was horrible,” she told me with a laugh, “but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.” There was a makeshift salon in prison, and she found tenderness in the hairdresser’s care. “Minus the bars on the window,” she said, “I was like, I kind of felt like I was in an actual shop right now. At least I can get away in here, a little bit.”

It might have been the only time during those 10 months that she felt somewhat free. Griner writes in her book that in elementary school, she saw white Bengal tigers on a school trip to the Houston aquarium. She watched them, wondering what they were thinking. In her own captivity, she had a sense. Anytime she was transported anywhere in Russia, she writes, she was put in a steel cage so small that she had to sit sideways, her knees cramped against her chest, her head brushing the top. Once, at a court appearance, a guard locked her wrists together and then chained the lock to her own wrist. Griner felt like a dog on a leash. The humiliating treatment felt deliberate, spectacle as punishment: She was a prize or a pawn, paraded as an example of Russian power.

Griner’s voice, a languid baritone, remained steady as she told me about the horrors in prison: watching fellow inmates being treated roughly and denied medication; hearing of a young woman who died of cancer; being forced to undress and be photographed nude by doctors. She told me that she prefers when people ask her to talk about what happened rather than avoiding it out of politeness. “People walking on eggshells?” she said. “That doesn’t help me.” But as she spoke about her experiences, her eyes locked on mine and they lost some of their natural impish glint. She wrapped her arms protectively around her rib cage and chest. “The waves have gotten better,” she told me, describing the fluctuations of her emotional state. Athletes are used to dissociating from pain to play. Joints without cartilage, tweaked backs, aching ankles — Griner has had them all, and is well accustomed to pushing through. But this is an experience that will linger in her bones.

On the morning of Feb. 15, 2022, Griner didn’t want to leave her warm bed, where she was cuddling with her wife, Cherelle Griner, at their home in Phoenix. But she had to make her plane to Russia. She’d been playing for a team there for nearly a decade to supplement her W.N.B.A. salary. As one of the highest-profile players in the league, she recently signed a contract for a little over $150,000 for the 2024 season; in Russia, though, she could net more than $1 million. Playing there wasn’t entirely about the money. A kid from Texas, she relished the opportunity to live and travel abroad. And she was treated to the real superstar experience: elite parties, fancy dinners, chartered planes. It was a taste of the life enjoyed by her higher-paid peers in the N.B.A. But working year-round was taking a toll on her body. She thought that this season in Russia might be her last.

Her wife usually packed her bags, loading them with American staples like candy, Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, pancake mix and Creole seasoning. This time, Cherelle organized only the big roller bags, leaving Griner responsible for her carry-ons. When Griner finally got up, she didn’t clear them out and repack them. Instead, she hurriedly shoved in her essentials, a Nintendo Switch, a few pairs of underwear and sweatpants and her laptop. She nearly missed her plane.

When she arrived in Moscow, she stopped in customs before her transfer flight to Yekaterinburg, a smaller city where her Russian team was based. She loaded her carry-ons onto the conveyor belt at the security checkpoint and prepared to walk through the metal detector. She noticed agents pulling people out of line — all foreigners. “They were singling out anybody that didn’t look Russian,” she said. “I just felt like they were searching for something.”

At first, when they flagged her bags, Griner wasn’t too concerned. This was her eighth season in Russia; she paid taxes there and was familiar with the country and its laws. The customs agent asked her to search her own items, which she found unusual. As soon as she felt the cannabis-oil cartridge stowed in a zippered inner pocket in her backpack, her stomach sank. Medical marijuana had been prescribed by a physician in Arizona to treat her chronic pain, but it was illegal in Russia. “I was like: Oh, [expletive]. Oh, this is about to be bad,” she told me, and continued to detail the events of the day. Another cartridge was found in a roller bag. She panicked, calling and texting Cherelle and her family. No one answered. It was the middle of the night in the United States, and they were all asleep.

Griner was told to wait while the agent took the cartridges for testing, along with her passport. Other officials arrived and demanded that she sign a document in Russian. Nyet , she replied, pushing it away. She used Google Translate to look up another word: advocat , meaning “lawyer.” They pressured her to sign until she buckled, writing her name. The agents took her outside and loaded her into an unofficial-looking sedan and drove her to a redbrick building. The officials later came back with terrifying news: They had tested her cartridges and said they found 0.7 grams of cannabis oil total in two vape pens. Griner was charged with illegal drug possession and smuggling a “significant amount” of narcotics into the country, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of a million rubles, which was then about $15,000.

By now, Cherelle and Griner’s agent, Lindsay Colas, were awake. Griner had been able to send a location pin through WhatsApp of where she was being held, and Colas frantically arranged for a Russian lawyer, Alex Boykov, to meet her. When Boykov arrived, investigators continued interrogating Griner. They wanted to know why she was in Russia, why she was bringing “drugs” in, whom they were for. Afterward, she was handcuffed and squeezed into another tiny civilian car. For hours, she sat hunched over in pain as she was driven all over Moscow — a sightseeing tour from hell. The car finally stopped at a local detention center.

Griner was led to a cell and given some bedding for a discolored mattress. Her phone had been taken, but she had been allowed to keep a small bag of personal items, which she packed with some clothes and her Sudoku book. The room stank: A feces-stained hole in the ground served as the toilet. The prison guards brought her a milky porridge with a piece of oily fish that sickened her. She had no way to clean herself — no towels, soap, toothpaste, shampoo or deodorant. She ripped T-shirts into several pieces: for her teeth, for her body, for toilet paper. The bed was too small for her frame, and her calves dangled over the edge. Her old sports injuries flared up as she lay there, writhing in agony. The next morning, prison guards snickered outside her cell. She caught some English mixed with the Russian: “American,” and then, “basketball.” They flipped open the peephole and peered at her. “I’ve never been so dirty in my life,” she said. The degradation would push her to contemplate suicide. “I felt horrible.”

At her arrest hearing on Feb. 19, she was put in a small cage and watched facial expressions for clues about the proceedings. Boykov translated: She was denied bail and house arrest and told she would be detained for at least 30 days. Later, Griner got even worse news: On Feb. 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. President Vladimir V. Putin warned the United States not to get involved in Russian affairs. The stakes of her arrest were already high, but the war ratcheted them up; Griner understood that she was now caught in the middle of a standoff between global rivals.

Soon, Griner was moved to a women’s detention center about two hours outside Moscow. Her head spun. “Going from being free, you know, having freedom of movement, to have absolutely nothing, not even the necessities. … ” Her face turned stony as she sat in the memory. “That quick change to being in a box, not knowing what’s coming next, what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the middle of the night when you hear a door open and footsteps coming to your door, and you’re like, Is this the moment?”

She lay awake at night, anxious thoughts looping through her head, as she did when she was a child. She thought about Cherelle and her family. She agonized over bringing shame to the Griner name, over feeding into caustic stereotypes of Black people as drug abusers. There were real threats to deal with as well: She was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. In Russia, homosexuality is often called a mental illness, and Griner worried that she could be institutionalized. She was asked about her “sick thoughts” and “drug problem” and pressed to admit that she was guilty.

As Griner’s imprisonment stretched on, however, her world expanded in unexpected ways. She writes that she became particularly close to her bunkmate Alena, a former volleyball player who had been an exchange student in London and was fluent in English. They were together 24 hours a day. Alena translated everything, telling Griner what the guards were whispering, helping her order water and food from the commissary and barter with other incarcerated women, warning her that herpes and H.I.V. were rampant in the prison and that she should avoid medical exams if she could. At one point, she helped when Griner got a severe eye infection and urgently needed care. (Griner heard that the person who treated her was a veterinarian.) They would watch a 90-minute trashy Turkish soap opera that replaced Griner’s beloved “Grey’s Anatomy,” with Alena translating each twist.

The days were stultifying, the nights sleepless. “My life became a blur of sweeping and dusting, cleaning and praying, hoping I could somehow get home,” she writes. “I hurt because I knew I’d handed the world a weapon.”

To relieve her stress, Griner picked up the habit of smoking cigarettes, up to a pack a day. At one point, her Russian team donated a basketball so she could shoot on a hoop in the prison yard, but she kept getting winded. She lost muscle mass and gained weight from commissary staples — packaged noodles, muffins, salami, condensed milk — that felt safer to eat than the fish porridge. She felt depressed, and even sit-ups in her cell felt beyond her capacity.

Griner surprised herself by taking solace in the Bible. In the past, she associated religion with pain and intolerance. But Cherelle was a preacher’s daughter, and in her letters, which were often delayed, she encouraged Griner to lean into her faith. Griner requested a Bible, and the warden approved. She studied it every morning after cell search and showers and sneaked in a few more passages after lights out. A favorite was Psalms 56:3-4: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise — in God I trust and am not afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” Freedom held the luxury of resisting faith, but prison required embracing it.

Griner spent her childhood in the Bellewood section of Houston. She was close to her older sister and her two older half siblings from her father’s previous marriage. In her 2014 memoir, “In My Skin,” Griner describes a comfortable but constrained childhood. By middle school, she towered over her classmates and felt like an outcast. Kids called her “freak.” They antagonized her for her height, her undeveloped chest, her deepening voice. Once, a popular girl walked up to Griner and groped her. She turned to her friends and declared that Griner “must be a boy.” The constant harassment weighed on her, and she became anxious and depressed. Instead of talking about her emotions, she mouthed off to teachers. There were a few knock-down, drag-out fights with other girls. Griner obsessed over being “normal” and drew grim pictures and fantasized about suicide. She was wishing away so much of what would make her successful later in life — her size and strength.

Her father, who worked in law enforcement, governed the household with a severity rooted in paranoia. She was to come straight home after school, her play limited to the yard. There were no sleepovers. But his vigilance helped Griner sharpen her own. She also inherited his stubbornness — refusing to bend to his tough punishments and judgments of her. Their best moments together were in the yard or the garage, cutting grass or fixing the family cars. Griner worked shirtless, like her father.

She writes that she once heard him sneer that a woman was a “dyke.” Her mother was gentle and accepting. Griner wanted to be loved by them both for her full self. She tried to send subtle signals to her father, like leaving her boxers in the laundry. At school, she sagged her Girbaud jeans and wore oversize T-shirts. She used the family computer to look up the words “gay” and “lesbian” and immediately knew she was reading about herself. It was a relief: There were blueprints, communities, outlets beyond her immediate world.

Griner was growing so fast that her parents had her tested to make sure nothing was wrong. No illness; just luck. The logic of her body made perfect sense when she finally stepped on the basketball court in ninth grade. Her gifts were undeniable. Her wingspan, at 7 feet 3½ inches, is longer than LeBron James’s. When she was in high school, a video of her dunking went viral. Watching her, the way she lifts the ball over the rim and into the net as gently as if she were returning a lost child to a parent, brings to mind the way the filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa describes Black ingenuity in the sport: “We didn’t invent basketball, but we created it.”

She was recruited to play at Baylor University, a Baptist school in Waco, Texas, not far from where she grew up, and became the team’s star player. She and her coach, Kim Mulkey, had a tense relationship. Griner says she felt singled out by Mulkey for various reasons, including being gay. (Mulkey has denied treating gay players differently.) But it didn’t diminish her love of the game. She polished her footwork, learned to shoot with precision and efficiency and likened the energy on the court to “turning the volume way up on a good song.”

In 2013, she arrived at the W.N.B.A. draft in a gleaming white custom-made three-piece suit. She looked poised and confident. When the Mercury selected her with the No.1 draft pick, even though she knew it was coming, a shy grin touched her lips. A few days later, she gave an interview to Sports Illustrated and answered a probing question about her sexual identity by saying, “I’ve always been open about who I am.” The following year, Griner became the first openly gay athlete to be endorsed by Nike. Her boldness set a new standard, helping to normalize queerness in American sports, especially for women.

Prison in Russia reopened old wounds, memories of her adolescent body as an object of fascination and prurient speculation. Guards heckled her, made lewd jokes, asked about her genitalia. Once, she recounted, while returning from the shower with a towel draped around her neck, a guard stopped her and looked her up and down. The guard used her baton to push the towel out of the way and stared at Griner’s chest. Griner was furious but unable to do anything about it.

Griner thought constantly about her family — her wife’s well-being, her parents’ growing frailty. She struggled to write to her father, fearing his disappointment. When she finally did, she said she would “never let you down like this again.” Weeks later, she received his unequivocal reply. “I love you and always will, no matter where you are,” he wrote. “Nothing and nobody can change that.” His affirmation was simple. It allowed her to release some of the debilitating shame and gather herself for what she would have to endure.

The world got its first glimpse of the imprisoned Griner on July 1, 2022, nearly five months after her arrest, when she arrived in court in Moscow for the start of her trial. In photos and videos, she looked stunned, eyes unnaturally wide. Griner had always understood that she was well known in Russia — some guards had even asked her for photographs and autographs — but she didn’t grasp the scale of her case until that moment. There were nearly 100 journalists present, shouting questions and snapping photographs; it reminded her of the media circus around the N.B.A. Finals.

Griner came dressed in a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt in symbolic protest; Hendrix was arrested on a drug charge in 1969 in Toronto and found not guilty. She also held photographs of her wife and Mercury teammates against the bars of her cage. She wanted to try to shape the narrative, to remind the people in Russia and back home that her story went beyond a single mistake.

Griner’s family and legal team still hadn’t spoken with President Biden directly. And they were devastated after a scheduled call between Cherelle and Brittney was bungled by the State Department and never went through. “The roots of Black skepticism go back generations,” Griner writes, “in a country that hasn’t always had our backs; it was too busy breaking them.” Griner, in consultation with her wife and lawyers, decided to plead guilty. It seemed unwise to call the Russian government liars; they were betting that an American humbling herself before Putin would get her home faster. She also wrote a letter to Biden to be sent on July 4, begging him not to forget about her. “Please do all you can to bring us home,” she said. “I still have so much good to do with my freedom that you can help restore.”

In early July, Cherelle was interviewed by Gayle King to raise awareness, noting that Griner’s team had yet to meet with the Biden administration. The president reached out to tell Cherelle that talks about a prisoner swap were underway and to caution that pressuring him in public “would play into Russia’s hands.” He replied to Griner’s letter, saying that “getting you home is top of mind for all of us.” Griner’s team revved up its online efforts, rallying the Rev. Al Sharpton and her teammates and other players to call for a lenient verdict.

Cherelle and Colas, her agent, crafted a hashtag that became the rallying cry to keep Griner’s story relevant over the months. They initially considered “LoveBG” but ultimately went with “WeAreBG.” The choice shortened the distance between Griner and those who had ever worried about their safety at home or abroad. Colas told me that the intention was to remind people of Griner’s universality, despite the unusual circumstances. “Britney stepping into her power and sharing about herself has always given people permission to be themselves and be loud about it.”

During the 2022 W.N.B.A. All-Star Game, the players wore Griner’s jersey number in solidarity during the second half. N.B.A. players like LeBron James and Stephen Curry publicly questioned what seemed like the U.S. government’s inaction on the case. But her most devoted and persistent advocates were Black women, many of them arguing online that the government’s response felt muted, a continuation of the culture of neglect that fails to adequately protect them and gender-nonconforming people. Kerry Washington and Roxane Gay campaigned for her in the American media. Thousands sent Griner messages of support in prison. In the acknowledgments of her book, Griner thanks Black women in the press for keeping her name alive throughout her detainment.

“Russia understands the way American public opinion matters to the presidency,” Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the intersection of Blackness and the Eastern Bloc, told me, “and they played with it.” The tactic worked: Griner’s case incited rancor and debate between those who argued that the American government wasn’t doing enough and those who cast Griner as a criminal and argued that other American detainees in Russia, like Paul Whelan, a former Marine accused of spying, should be a higher priority.

On Aug. 4, Griner returned to court for sentencing. Her defense team detailed the mishandling of her case: She had no lawyer during initial questioning and was pressured to sign documents she didn’t understand, and the amount of cannabis was exaggerated, among other things. Griner was given the chance to read a statement, which she insisted on writing herself. “My parents taught me two important things,” she read, hands shaking. “One, to take ownership for your responsibilities. And two, to work hard for everything that you have. That’s why I pled guilty to my charges. I understand the charges that are against me, … but I had no intent to break any Russian law. I want the court to understand that it was an honest mistake that I made while rushing and in stress.” She apologized to her American and Russian teammates, her family, her friends.

The judge was unmoved. Griner was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony. Her release date would be Oct. 20, 2031. She froze, unable to digest the information. Her Russian lawyers surreptitiously called Cherelle on FaceTime and held the phone up through the bars of Griner’s cage, and they wept together. A nearby guard saw but did not intervene. He seemed as shocked as they were.

In early November 2022, Griner was loaded onto a train with other female inmates. After seven or eight days of traveling in cages in the dark, they finally stopped and were met by guards with automatic weapons and barking German shepherds. Griner had been taken to a repurposed Soviet-era gulag in Mordovia, 200 miles outside Moscow. Inmates referred to the region as “the ass of Russia,” and Griner would soon understand why. For several days, no one in her family or on her legal team knew where she was.

She was given a uniform of thick green corduroy that was too short to cover her body and a head wrap similar to a hijab. She moved into a room crammed with bunks for 20 women, and the bathroom was shared by 50. She was put to work for 12-, sometimes 15-hour shifts, cutting big pieces of fabric for Russian military uniforms with rusty, dangerous spinning blades. Separated from Alena, her lifeline, and the smaller jail setting that had become familiar, she was desolate. She decided to adopt a new survival strategy: letting go of hope. “I thought I was going to be there for the long haul,” she told me. “I’m tired of waiting for the day. It’s easier to just accept the situation I’m in. I’m an inmate.”

Sometimes she would volunteer to shovel the snow and ice around the prison — the manual labor reminded her of her training. “It made me feel like I was lifting weights, because snow is super heavy,” she said. The exercise distracted her, kept her busy. In this remote prison, she had even less contact with the outside world. There were few visits from her lawyer. Almost no one spoke English, and she began to lose some fluency. There were small kindnesses: Welders made her a bigger bed, and another woman sewed her mittens and a prison uniform that fit and kept her somewhat warmer in the uninsulated cell. Ann, the head cook, spoke English and recruited her to help with kitchen duties. When the electricity went out for a few days, Griner carried hunks of cow from the freezer to the fields where they cooked meals, warming up by the fires. She celebrated Thanksgiving alone with a smoked turkey leg and rice with soy sauce that she bought from the commissary.

At home, Cherelle spoke about Griner every chance she got: on “The View” and at awards ceremonies. Her case was still a lightning rod: Dennis Rodman (publicly) and Donald Trump (privately) each said he would fly to Russia to get her.

In late November, after about a month in Mordovia, Griner was pulled from work to take a call from the U.S. Embassy. She was told that discussions for a prisoner swap were underway and that she should keep quiet about it. Griner was elated, but cautious. For a week she heard nothing. Once again, she was summoned to the warden’s office and told that the trade was imminent. She began preparing, donating her possessions — shampoo, food, clothes — and giving Ann the money she made working for five weeks, less than $100. The other incarcerated women brought photos of their kids for her to sign, which she did. Then, she waited.

On Dec. 2, she was loaded into a cage inside a van with four guards. They rode in the dark, without a translator, for eight hours. They stopped at another prison and started the process of booking her. Alarmed, she realized that it was a men’s facility. She felt a rising panic: Had she been tricked? Would she be forced to serve the remainder of her sentence here? She soothed herself by watching the World Cup, Portugal versus Switzerland. Around lights out, a guard slipped a note through her door. It held the words she’d been waiting months to hear: “You leave tonight.” She stayed up all night, praying that it was real.

In the morning, she writes, she was taken to an examination room, where a man who said he was a doctor stood with seven armed guards. She was told to remove her clothes, which she did. He gestured for her to remove her boxers too. Fear coursed through her, but she complied, standing without covering herself or cowering. They began photographing her from every angle — a final display of total power and control over her body.

Afterward, she was driven to a plane and boarded, though she had no idea where it was going. She was too wired to sleep and too scared to eat, afraid of being poisoned. The plane finally landed, in Abu Dhabi. As she disembarked, she was greeted by Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs in the State Department. He handed her a pin that read “We Are BG.” Griner exhaled, allowing relief to sink in for the first time. As she walked onto the tarmac, a man walked toward her. She recognized him as Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian arms dealer for whom she had been traded. As they passed each other, he reached for a handshake, and she instinctively complied. He offered congratulations. His hands were soft compared with her roughened ones; later she heard that he spent his time in prison painting pictures of cats. She boarded the plane Bout had come from.

When Griner arrived in San Antonio, Cherelle was waiting on the tarmac, surrounded by supporters waving American flags. Griner leaped down the airplane stairs and ran toward her. They embraced, in tears. They were ushered to a private lounge where they could get reacquainted. They sat as close as they could get, kissing, tracing each other’s features.

At first, being home was a nonstop adrenaline high. Griner reunited with her parents, her siblings and their children. She ate well, indulging in barbecue and snacks, luxuriating in hot showers and cuddling with Cherelle and bingeing movies. But as time went on, Griner struggled to adjust. During the trial, her home address was leaked, and she and Cherelle had to move into a safe house. She did a deep dive on social media of the coverage of her case and saw the vitriol directed at her. There were people who called her ugly slurs and said she should have been left to rot overseas. “We’re getting all this hate about how unpatriotic I am,” she told me. “That I’m un-American and shouldn’t be alive right now.”

In prison, Griner had a singular focus: freedom. Now she felt adrift, confused. Basketball had always been her compass, so she decided to start playing as soon as she could. The very first week she was back, she and Cherelle played one on one. She tired easily — chain-smoking in prison had shredded her lungs. Griner decided to see if she could still dunk. She could, though her back ached for days after. She started working out again, hard, though her go-to exercises like planks and curls with 50-pound dumbbells were nearly impossible. But the routines felt like home. She mapped out a 100-day conditioning plan to get ready for the upcoming W.N.B.A. season. Still, she felt overweight, and her lifelong struggles with body image resurfaced. There were days when she wouldn’t eat. “It was trying, big time,” she said. She wondered if she should quit, if this was the end of her career.

As the 2023 season began, she continued to feel disoriented. Each arena stop meant a reunion with players she hadn’t seen since she was detained, and during each game, video commemorations of her release were played. She appreciated the acknowledgment of what she had been through, but as time wore on, the reminders were triggering: It was hard to keep her head in the game. The Mercury lost 31 of 40 games. As the season wound down, without her usual plan to go overseas, she began to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. “People say it’s OK to not be OK,” she told me. “But what the hell does that mean? Just cry when I want to cry? Or be angry when I want to be angry? Or does that mean talking about it? Like, I had to figure that out.”

This season, Griner is grateful to return to the game she loves. And the timing couldn’t be better. Women’s basketball has garnered renewed attention, fueled in part by the exhilarating performances of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese in the March Madness tournament, followed by an electric W.N.B.A. draft. Griner’s detainment has also galvanized the women’s league and drawn national attention to a question it has long needed to address: pay-equity issues that push players abroad in the off-season. There’s a chance to invest in the future of the league more broadly. “We can build the type of stable league that could be financially worth it for players to stay home throughout the year,” Sue Bird, a former player for the Seattle Storm who is heavily involved in shaping the league, told me. “It could be a whole new world in the W.N.B.A.”

In 2025, the W.N.B.A. will have the opportunity to renegotiate player contracts. It’s a chance to advocate new pay structures, maternity support, a bigger percentage of revenue generated by licensing games to networks and streaming platforms and more security. “I’ve always talked about that, but I’m seeing it more now,” Griner told me. Last year at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, Griner was accosted by a conservative media personality who pushed a microphone in her face and shouted that she “hates America.” Unlike their peers in the N.B.A., W.N.B.A. teams still fly commercial during most of the regular season, exposing them to altercations like the one Griner experienced.

Before her imprisonment, she and Cherelle liked to spend lazy Sundays in bed, watching television and laughing. But being in a single room with a bed reminds her too much of prison. So does being cold. She has nightmares that she has to go back to Russia to file some errant paperwork and becomes trapped all over again. Between seasons, she and Cherelle used to venture down to Mexico for a few romantic days of relaxation. Now she’s afraid that she could be a valuable target for another hostage situation. “If I go to the wrong country,” she said, “they could literally just grab me.” (She will travel to Paris to play basketball in the Olympics this summer, but that feels wrapped in enough American security protocols to be safe.) Therapy has taught her that there is no “before” anymore. Her brain is different, and so is her life. One of the biggest signs that she’s recovering, she says, is that her words are back. When she first got home, she felt and sounded like a child feeling for language. “I felt like I went backward,” she told me.

During our meetings, Griner was raw and unguarded, willing to go as deep as the conversation required. But it hasn’t been easy or comfortable navigating her emotions in the public sphere: Because of her size, people often don’t always see her fragility. “There’s no room for tears as women,” she said. “If we have a moment, it’s like, Oh, she’s weak, being bitchy or irrational. We don’t get to process; we have to be on 24/7.” It’s clear that she continues to struggle with the feeling that her freedom is conditional, not something she inherently deserves. “I’m on borrowed time,” she told me. She plans to continue campaigning for other American detainees, including Paul Whelan and the journalist Evan Gershkovich.

Before we parted ways, Griner told me that going into nature — she loves off-roading in the dusty red mountains — has been one of her coping mechanisms. Before her ordeal in Russia, she didn’t need time away from people, to ground herself. But now, sometimes it’s the only thing that helps. “That’s a big thing for me — getting away from the screens and the cameras,” she said. “It feels like time slows down when I’m in nature.” She’s learning about the value of carving out a private identity. Not every part of her existence has to be an example or a cause. She and Cherelle are expecting their first child, and that will also reshape the way Griner engages with the public. Before I left Phoenix, I took her advice. I drove deep into the mountains, winding upward until the clouds thinned and the air grew clearer, sharper. I thought of Griner up there alone, without cell reception, a reprieve from the demands of her life. The dry desert mountains were covered in an astonishing amount of grass. They looked like green waves. It was a reminder that life grows in even the most arid conditions.

Read by January LaVoy

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by David Mason

Styling by Marquise Miller and Aaron Christmon.

Mickalene Thomas is an artist known for her paintings of African American women that combine historical, political and pop-culture references. Her solo show “All About Love” starts its tour at the Broad in Los Angeles in May.

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Past indefinite tense examples & sentences |Download PDF
Simple Past Indefinite Tense- Examples, Formula, Exercise, Rules, Structure
Past Indefinite Tense Definition, Formula, & Examples
20 EXAMPLES OF PAST INDEFINITE TENSE
Past Indefinite Tense Definition And Example And Structure
Past Indefinite Tense

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FUTURE INDEFINITE TENSE IN DETAIL
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Past Simple Tense
Past Indefinite Tense #Practice Set -1
past indefinite tense identification and with example explanation by.S.V Goswami

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The past indefinite tense: rules and unique usages
A series of completed actions. If a series of actions happened at a particular time in the past, use the Past indefinite tense to talk about it. Last night, he walked into my room, woke me up, and took me somewhere with him. After reaching there in the morning, we checked in to the hotel, got into our room, had breakfast, and went shopping.
Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work
Another factor that aids in past tense comparisons is the use of time expressions. Past Indefinite Tense requires definite time expressions such as "yesterday," "last week," or "a year ago.". In contrast, Present Perfect Tense employs indefinite time expressions like "ever," "never," "since," and "for.". Example:
English Grammar Tenses: Stories, Exercises and Answers
A tense is a form of the verb which shows the time at which an action happens. It comes from the Latin word "tempus", which means "time". ... The Present Perfect Progressive (Continuous) is a form of the verb that shows the action or state started in the past and continued until the present. For example: Lisa has been dancing for 3 hours ...
Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work
The basic rule is as follows. Take the infinitive of the verb and add 'ed', or simply 'd' if the verb already ends with an 'e'. For example: Many verbs end in a vowel and a consonant. An extra consonant is added when these verbs are turned into the past tense. For example, 'admit' turns into 'admitted'.
50 Examples of Past Indefinite Tense
50 Effective Examples of Past Indefinite Tense. Let's see the 50 effective examples of the past indefinite tense: I went to school yesterday. I slept every night last week. I wanted to visit my grandparents this weekend. I was exhausted from walking around all day.
Past Indefinite Tense: A Guide to Better Grammar
The Tenses. To understand and better use the past indefinite tense you have to first understand what a tense is. Tenses are modifications to a verb (active words, such as to throw, to jump, to believe, etc.) that dictate when the action took place. There are three tenses in English: past, present, and future. Each tense when applied to the verb ...
Past Indefinite Tense
For example: I did my duty correctly. He retired from his job. She controlled her weight. Lopa completed her homework. They missed their childhood. Structure: Subject+Verb (past form)+Object. Let us see the different forms of Past Indefinite Tense: Affirmative.
Past Indefinite Tense (Simple Past): 4 Rules & Examples
4 Rules of Past Indefinite Tense. Rule 01 - Past Indefinite Tense Marker Words & Phrases. Past Tense Marker Words & Phrase Chart. Rule 02 - Habit / Regular Action or Event of Past Moments. Rule 03 - Formal Request or Official Expression. Rule 04 - Any Past Duty or Obligation. Usages & Examples of Simple Past Tense in Practical Life.
50 Sentences Of Past Indefinite Tense Examples
The past indefinite tense, also known as the simple past tense, is used to describe actions or events that occurred in the past and are no longer ongoing. It is formed by adding "-ed" to regular verbs or using the past form of irregular verbs. For example, "She walked to the store yesterday.".
Past Indefinite Tense in English with Examples
Rule 1. We use the second form of the verb (past form) with all the pronouns ( He, She, It, I, We, You, They) and Nouns (Names). Also, remember that Past Indefinite is the only tense in which we use the 2nd form of the verb. These examples will help you understand this. I watched movies on Netflix.
Past Indefinite Tense, Definition, Rules and Example Sentences
The term indefinite direction is used to group all actions at indefinite times. These verbs are past tense, present tense, and future tense. It should be noted here that the appearance of the action is determined by whether the verb expresses a fact, an ongoing action, or an incomplete action. Actions of indefinite dimensions express facts.
Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets and Exercises with Answers
Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets. Worksheet 1:Fill in the blanks with appropriate form of the verb given in the brackets. Worksheet 2:Rewrite Sentences in Negative and Interrogative form. Answers of Worksheet 1: Past Indefinite Tense Worksheets.
Indefinite Tenses
The Role of the Indefinite Tenses Here is an explanation of how the three indefinite tenses are used: The Simple Past Tense. The simple past tense describes a completed activity that happened in the past. In other words, the activity started in the past and ended in the past. For example: He went. She played. The Simple Present Tense
Examples of Past Indefinite Tense
Here, we are sharing lots of examples of Past Indefinite Tense sentences that will help every level of students to understand the structure of this tense. It will be easier to practice with these examples. • She was the most important person in my life. • We played cricket in this field. • I ate a mango. • Jesus was the best human of ...
A Complete Guide to the Past Tenses
Past Simple. This is a really common and basic part of the English language, and knowledge of it is essential to IELTS success. Generally speaking, we form the past simple by adding "-ed" to a verb. However, in English there are hundreds of irregular verbs. So, whereas you might say "I walked" or "She watched," there are also cases ...
Past Indefinite Tense in English (Rules, Formula & Examples) PDF
1. Affirmative Past Indefinite Tense. Read the rules carefully given below: In the Past Indefinite Tense, we use the 2nd form of the main verb. This is the only tense with its own stage of action in which the second form of the main verb is used. Remember that the second form of the main verb is used with the subject and any person or number.
"Past Indefinite Tense: Learn the Rules and Examples"
#pasttense #pastindefinitetense #simplepasttense #pastsimpletense"Learn the rules and examples of the Past Indefinite Tense (also known as Simple Past or Pas...
Past Tense
The Oxford Learner's Dictionary defines the term 'past tense' as "the form of a verb used to describe actions in the past.". According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the past tense form of the verb is "used to describe verb forms in many languages used for actions that have now finished.". "A verb tense expressing action or state ...
Past Indefinite Tense Exercise with Answers in English (PDF)
We have prepared Past indefinite Tense Exercise with Answers which will help the students to understand the sentences when they make mistakes. These following exercises can be solved by students of any class or board. So, let's look at these exercises and find out how many students can answer them correctly. Past Indefinite Tense Exercise ...
Daily Routines
Notice how in this lesson all of these phrases are in the past simple tense and have I (first person singular) as the subject. Practice Exercises. Video practice: At the end of the video there is a practice exercise where a cartoon of a daily routine appears on the screen. There are also three phrases in the past tense next to the cartoon and ...
Past Indefinite Tense... (Statement Sentences ...
I hope after watching this video you will be able to make statement sentences in past indefinite tense easily....
Examples of Direct and Indirect Speech in Past Tense
If reported verb is in Past Tense & reported speech is in Past Perfect Tense, it will not change. e.g. Direct Speech. Indirect Speech. Abhi said to Nidhi, "Had you paid the fee?". Abhi asked Nidhi if she had paid the fee. Mr Roy said, "I had bought a house.". Mr Roy said that he had bought a house.
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Harvard prof illuminates 'blue period' in Black literature
One even wrote a book called "Why Literary Periods Mattered," past tense. ... In 1959, Baldwin wrote another important essay, which echoed Wright's frustrations with the Cold War. "The ...
Ilhan Omar Plunges Into Democrats' Political Storm Over War in Gaza
Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota has plunged into Democrats' political storm over the war in Gaza, further polarizing an already tense debate, after she suggested that some Jewish students ...
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Past Indefinite tense: rules, usages and tips

When to use the Past indefinite tense?

The Past Indefinite tense examples

The Past Indefinite tense structure

1. Affirmative sentence

2. Negative sentences

3. Interrogative sentences

The Past Indefinite tense usages

2. A series of completed actions

3. Repeated actions/habits in the past

4. To describe something or someone

5. To talk about the completed action and its duration in the past

6. To talk about something that happened a few moments ago (extremely close to the present)

Use of adverbs in the Past Indefinite tense

The Past Indefinite tense active and passive voice

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Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work

Understanding the Basics of Past Indefinite Tense

Structuring Sentences in the Past Indefinite Tense

Affirmative Sentence Construction

Forming Negative Statements

Asking Questions with Past Indefinite Tense

The Role of Regular and Irregular Verbs

Subject-Verb Agreement in Past Tense

Common Uses of the Past Indefinite Tense in Everyday Language

Comparing Past Indefinite Tense with Other Past Tenses

Distinction from Present Perfect Tense

Practical Examples of Past Indefinite Tense in Use

Tips for Mastering Past Indefinite Tense in English

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Past Indefinite Tense Examples: What They Are and How They Work

What is the Past Indefinite Tense?

Tenses and Their Purpose

The Past Indefinite Tense

Other Tenses

The Past Indefinite Structure

Verb 1, Verb 2, Verb 3

Affirmative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

Negative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

Interrogative Sentences in the Past Indefinite

When to Use the Past Indefinite

Events That Happened in the Past

Moods or States of Being in the Past

Repeated Actions in the Past

To Conclude

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Past Indefinite Tense | Definite, Structure and Examples

Examples of Past Indefinite Tense

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Interrogative Structure:

4 Rules of Past Indefinite Tense

Rule 01 – Past Indefinite Tense Marker Words & Phrases

Past Tense Marker Words & Phrase Chart

Rule 02 – Habit / Regular Action or Event of Past Moments

Rule 03 – Formal Request or Official Expression

Rule 04 – Any Past Duty or Obligation

Usages & Examples of Simple Past Tense in Practical Life

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