Grammar reference and practice 8.1

8.1 ■ Past simple: affirmative

Affirmative
I You He / She / It    We They	lived	20,000 years ago.

Spelling rules

• ■Most regular verbs: add -ed

  ■Regular verbs ending in -e: add -d

  ■Short regular verbs ending in consonant + vowel + consonant: double final consonant and add -ed

  ■Regular verbs ending consonant + -y: change -y to -ied

Use

We use the past simple for:

• ■a completed past action or a past state. We often use it with expressions that show when things happened, such as yesterday, … ago, when I was a child, in April / in 2008, last night / last week / last month / last year, etc.

  The girls played football with their friends yesterday.

  We travelled from Kazakhstan to Kenya last year.

  ■a past habit, often with an adverb of frequency or a time expression, such as every week / every Monday / every summer / every year.

  We usually walked to the sports centre after school.

  They phoned their uncle every Monday.

  ■a sequence of actions in the past.

  He smiled at the girl and then disappeared.

1Choose the correct word. 

• 1They looklooked for their dog in the garden.

• 2She chatschatted to her friends last night.

• 3We often useduse the internet for our homework when we were students.

• 4Thomas Edison inventedinvents the light bulb.

• 5You triedtry very hard yesterday. Well done!

• 6The students wantwanted to change their course last year.

 

2Complete the sentences with the past simple form of the verbs in brackets. 

You need to use normal letters and capital letters correctly in this task.

• 1Jess and Amy  (watch) an interesting programme on TV.

• 2We  (stay) at a hotel.

• 3You  (copy) my homework!

• 4My father  (wait) for me outside the station.

• 5The film  (start) at 7.20 and it  (finish) at 9.00.

• 6She  (like) her new phone.

• 7They  (study) Japanese at college.

• 8I  (hate) cheese when I was a child.