| 239040 |
Past Simple or Past Continuous
Hi good people, I need some insight related to a key answer to a question I found on the internet related to simple past and past continuous. The question goes like this:
She .... (very fast) and she ... (not see) the tree.
The blanks should be filled with the correct form of either the two tenses I mentioned above and the key answer is (She was running very fast and didn't see the tree)
I am a bit confused since, say we refer to the rule of parallelism, shouldn't it be (she was running very fast and was not seeing the tree.) or (she ran very fast and didn't see the tree.)?
Another question is: Last weekend Susan ... (walk) and ... (break) her leg.
The key answer is: (Last weekend Susan was walking and broke her leg.)
Could someone please help me with some explanation with these 2 questions? Thanks in advance.
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Language pair: English; All
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| 239051 |
Re: Past Simple or Past Continuous
Hello there,
the explanation of your query depends upon what type of answers are sought after for the questions. If the questions were asking for the best combination of the simple past and past continuous tenses, then “She was running very fast and didn’t see the tree” is the usual English structure: “was running” is the past continous, and “didn’t see” is the simple past (in a negated form). The past continuous provides the background context in which the simple past focus of the sentence occurred. The same explanation applies with “Last weekend Susan was walking and broke her leg”; “was walking” is the background context in the past continuous, and “broke” is the sentence’s focus in the simple past.
Other combinations of these tenses are possible. Using the simple past in both cases, “She ran very fast and didn’t see the tree” and “Last weekend Susan walked and broke her leg”, keeps both actions as the focus of each sentence, which is a common occurrence in English, for example in news reports. Using the past continuous in both cases, “She was running very fast and wasn’t seeing the tree” and “Last weekend Susan was walking and was breaking her leg” is grammatical but not common; in particular, breaking a leg is a difficult thing to do on a continuous basis. Finally, the last combination, “She ran very fast and wasn’t seeing the tree” and “Last weekend Susan walked and was breaking her leg” is also grammatical but uncommon.
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 239040
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