Read the extracts carefully and answer the following questions given below.
i)"However, I did not say anything but started the packing. It seemed a longer job than I had thought it was going to be…"
a) Whom does ‘I’ stand for?
b) Why didn’t ‘I’ say anything?
c)How many times the Speaker packed the bag?
d) Name the two friends of the speaker.
e) What were the things that the speaker had forgotten to keep inside the bag?
ii) “When I was alive and had a human heart, I did not know what tears were…”
a) Who is the speaker?
b) Why the speaker didn’t know about ‘tears’?
c) What does the speaker want the listener to do?
d) What happened to the speaker in the end?
e) Whom is the speaker speaking to here?
Answers
Time up to a point in the past
We use the past perfect simple (had + past participle) to talk about time up to a certain point in the past.
She'd published her first poem by the time she was eight.
We'd finished all the water before we were halfway up the mountain.
Had the parcel arrived when you called yesterday?
Past perfect for the earlier of two past actions
We can use the past perfect to show the order of two past events. The past perfect shows the earlier action and the past simple shows the later action.
When the police arrived, the thief had escaped.
It doesn't matter in which order we say the two events. The following sentence has the same meaning.
The thief had escaped when the police arrived.
Note that if there's only a single event, we don't use the past perfect, even if it happened a long time ago.
The Romans spoke Latin. (NOT The Romans had spoken Latin.)
Past perfect with before
We can also use the past perfect followed by before to show that an action was not done or was incomplete when the past simple action happened.
They left before I'd spoken to them.
Sadly, the author died before he'd finished the series.