Simple Past Tense

Simple Past Tense

by Miss Sainsbury

To Refresh Your Memory on Verb Tense

​Verbs come in three tenses: past, present, and future.

• The past is used to describe things that have already happened (e.g., earlier in the day, yesterday, last week, three years ago).

• The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous.

• The future tense describes things that have yet to happen (e.g., later, tomorrow, next week, next year, three years from now).

​Simple Past Tense

​The simple past is a verb tense that is used to talk about things that happened or existed before now.

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Imagine someone asks what your brother Wolfgang did while he was in town last weekend.

• ​Wolfgang entered a hula hoop contest.

• ​He won the silver medal.

​Simple Past Tense

​You can also use the simple past to talk about a past state of being, such as the way someone felt about something. This is often expressed with the simple past tense of the verb to be and an adjective, noun, or prepositional phrase.

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​Examples

• ​Wolfgang was proud of his hula hoop victory.

• ​The contest was the highlight of his week.​

​To 'be' verbs

• ​“To be” verbs are: are, am, is, was, were, been and being.

• They are used to describe or tell us the condition of people, things, places and ideas.

• For example, they could tell us the subject’s age, nationality, job or other traits. 

• ​For example, I was a rocket scientist (which means the subject in the past was a rocket scientist).

​Simple Past Tense

​For regular verbs, add -ed to the root form of the verb (or just -d if the root form already ends in an e):

• ​play -> played

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For other irregular verbs, including the verb to be, the simple past forms are more irregular:

• ​see -> saw

• ​build -> built

• ​are -> was/were

Try your best to select the correct answer. The correct answer will be in the past simple.​

Multiple Select

She ____________ to Canada by plane last year.

• went

• missed

• practiced

• talked

Multiple Select

Siwon _______________ to me on the phone this morning.

• went

• ate

• talked

• cleaned

Multiple Choice

She ____ some cake for her family.

• make

• made

• making

Multiple Choice

They ____ the movie last week.

• watch

• watches

• watched

Multiple Choice

When Mimi ____ this sad story, I ____ a lot.

• told, cried

• told, cries

• tells, cries

Multiple Choice

Joey ____ on the couch last night.

• sleep

• slept

• sleeps

Multiple Choice

They ____ why he did it.

• understood

• understand

• understanding

Multiple Choice

We ____ to them yesterday.

• speak

• speaks

• spoke