The past perfect tense is used to express action completed in the past:
"She had eaten is an example of the tense."
The past perfect tense represents action that occurs BEFORE another past action:
"My boss had gone before I had the chance to see him."
The past perfect tense uses had + the past participle of the main verb
"She had never tried surfing before she visited Australia."
As you learn English, it's very important to develop an understanding of words that regularly occur together. Words that go together are called collocations. Knowing them will make your English sound more natural.
Choose the best collocation in these sentences:
Hollywood actor Johnny Depp has been given an _1_ by Australia: Either send your pet dogs back home to the United States or they will be put _2_.
“There is a process if you want to bring animals: you get the permits, they go into _3_ and then you can have them,” said Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.
Use the simple past tense to talk about actions that have already finished. It doesn't matter when in the past they happened or how long they happened for.
Take a look and compare the present tense verbs with simple past tense verbs in these two sentences.
Present:
I take my young brother to the park and buy him an ice-cream. We kick around a football, laugh and talk for hours.
What are the seven missing words in this short text about UK politics?
The people of Britain will step into _1_ booths on May 7 to choose their next government.
Opinion polls currently suggest no party will win an _2_ victory and another hung Parliament is likely. In this event current Prime Minister, David Cameron, would offer the Libral Democrat Party a repeat of the last five years in forming a _3_ government.
It's heating up (the weather is getting warmer) here in Malta.
Do you know that heat up is also used to describe a situation that is becoming intense, or angry: "The conversation started to heat up so I decided to leave."
Here are five other heat related expressions.
If you can take the heat you can take criticism and handle stressful situations.
"Don't worry, if the project fails and the boss gets angry, I'll take the heat for us."
Take a look at these ten sentences, there is one mistake in each one. Can you find all of them? Write your correct sentences in the comments area.
A prefix is placed before a base word to modify its meaning.
Examples of prefixes include:
return, reply, return
unkind, untrue, uncertain
misunderstand, misprint, mistrust
Pre is a prefix which means before, prior to, early and in front of.
Synonyms are words that are similar or have a related meaning to another word. For example, small and little have the same meanings. Beautiful and gorgeous are also synonyms.
Can you match the words on the left to their synonyms on the right?
In English some words have silent letters. This means that how a word is pronounced and how it is spelt is different. We write the silent letter when we spell the word, but it is not heard when we speak.
Here are some examples. The orange letter in each word is silent.
Silent B
The lift is broken, we'll have to climb the stairs.
A baby sheep is called a lamb.
Silent C
