Past Simple

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Welcome to our Past Simple Exercises. Let’s learn how to use the past simple tense to describe moments and periods of time in the past. It is important to learn how to use them properly at this expanding stage of English,, where there is more focus on academic tasks and language functions. These Past Simple Exercises teach you to talk about the completion of an event or action.

About 20 minutes.Learning how to use the past tense.Expanding stage of learning English.

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We can often just put -ed at the end (regular verbs). But many verbs are irregular, so you don’t use -ed. Can you spot the regular and irregular verbs in the past tense?

Listen to the answers.

You can often just put -ed at the end (regular verbs)

I play basketball at school now. Before that, I played football last term.
Charlie passed his exam because he studied very hard.
I stopped off at the coffee shop on my way home from school.

But many verbs are irregular, so you don’t use -ed.

see ⇢ saw = I saw a great movie at the cinema last night.
go ⇢ went = Emma went home late last night
write ⇢ wrote = Jack wrote an email to his friend yesterday.

When you use the past of be (am/is/are), it changes to was/were.

In questions and negative sentences, you use did/didn’t + infinitive

I enjoyed the football match last night. Did you enjoy it?
Did you go to the cinema? No, I didn’t.
I didn’t go to school yesterday because I wasn’t feeling very well.

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