Grammar Exercises with Answers: Past Tense

This exercise should not have been too difficult for any student other than the complete beginner, although one or two words in the vocabulary might be unknown. The passage is taken from a famous humorous story, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. Try reading it aloud.

It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed. We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine-apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apples, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the blade and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they dressed their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a tea cup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day.... Harris got off with merely a flesh wound....

As for the tin...

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far out into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot...

VERB FORM AND USE

01 simple present
02 simple present have-be
03 drill: third person
04 elementary present
05 intermediate present

07 elementary past
08 continuous and simple
09 irregular past
10 irregular past
11 irregular past

14 past tense review
15 past tense review

19 present perfect
20 present/past perfect

23 conditional review
24 conditional
25 conditional

28 use of gerund
29 gerund
30 gerund and infinitive
31 gerund and infinitive
32 gerund and infinitive
33 gerund and infinitive