Simple Past with Regular Verbs

Simple Past with Regular Verbs

Past simple regular

• We often add -ed to verbs (regular verbs) to make the past simple.

• We often watch a film on Saturday. ⇒ We watched a film last Saturday.

• I live in Hermosillo. ⇒ I lived in Tepic in the 80s.

We use the past tense to talk about:

• something that happened once in the past:

  I was born  in 1987.

• something that happened several times in the past:

  When I was a boy, I walked a mile to school every day.

  They always enjoyed visiting their friends.

• something that was true for some time in the past:

  I lived abroad for ten years.

  He enjoyed being a student.

  She played a lot of tennis when she was younger.

Time Expressions for Past

• We often use expressions with ago with the past simple:

  I  lived there a long time ago.

• We can use the past simple to talk about past finished actions or states. We know and we often mention when these actions happened with a past time expression: yesterday, yesterday morning, last night, last week, two days ago, five years ago, etc.

Past simple questions

• We use did to make questions with the past simple:

  Did she play tennis when she was younger?

  Did you live abroad?

• But questions with who often don't use did:

  Who discovered penicillin?

  
  

Past simple negatives

• We use didn't (did not) to make negatives with the past simple:

  I didn't talk to my sister last week. 

• We didn't work yesterday.

• She didn't clean her room.