Page 60 - Oxford_English_Grammar_Course_Basic_2015

SECTION 4 past tenses

grammar summary

simple past: / worked, she worked, he didn't work etc
past progressive (or 'past continuous'): / wos working, she was working, he wasn't working etc

English has two 'past' tenses.
• We use the simple past for complete finished actions. We often use it in stories.
I wrote ten letters yesterday. A man walked into a police station and asked...

• We use the past progressive to talk about actions which were unfinished at a past time.
'What were you doing at 10.00 last night7 7 was writing letters.'

< About 6,000 years ago, somebody About 2,200 years ago,
painted this picture on a cave wall in Shi Huangdi completed
Namibia, south-west Africa. the Great Wall of China.
▼

Stonehenge, in southern England, is
about 4,800 years old. Who built it?
Nobody knows.

◄ About 1,200 years ago, Vikings from
Scandinavia made this beautiful ship.

THE CAVE OF

C HA U V E I ^ po n x - d ' ar c

bout 33,000 years ago, in the Stone Age, a
Aman or a woman drew this owl on the wall
of a cave in southern France. We don't know
anything about the artist, and we never will. We
only know that somebody saw an owl, saw that
it was beautiful, and recorded its beauty. (When
Picasso first saw prehistoric cave art, he said 'We
have learnt nothing.') Before the Bronze Age or
the Iron Age, before the glaciers covered Europe
and went away again, before all of recorded
history, an unknown person left a message for us:
'I sawthis creature, and I thought it was beautiful'.
Thank you. Stone Age artist.

PAST TENSES 45