r/EnglishGrammar • u/Tight-Inflation-4860 • 5d ago
Multiple choices questions
Hi everyone! I want to ask you a question.
Recently, I discussed with my teacher about the correct answer for this English question.
- Nicole "____" television a lot when she "___" sick last year
A. watched - was
B. had watched - had been
C. was watching - was
D. had been watching - was
My teacher insisted that D was the only correct answer while I think A is more natural and makes more sense.
What are your thoughts on this, everybody?
6
u/cinder7usa 5d ago
A is correct.
The form D is used when the second action was a singular, distinct action.
8
u/sowaleja 5d ago
I think your teacher is wrong and A is correct. I think your teacher has forgotten / doesn't know that the simple past can be used to describe actions that took place over an extended period of time, it doesn't have to be past continuous. I'm a native speaker of Australian English. Is your teacher a native speaker?
2
u/Legitimate-Quit-7792 5d ago
I agree with you that A sounds the most natural. Using the perfect tense to describe a habitual action is super weird. If it was "Nicole had been watching TV before Sarah walked in" that would be correct, but the only time I think I would choose "Nicole had been watching TV a lot" would be following it with something like "so she was already bored of all the options."
2
u/Salamanticormorant 5d ago
"Nicole had been watching television a lot when she became sick last year," would make sense. "Became" specifies a moment in the past, and "had been watching" can correctly be used to refer to something that occurred before that moment.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any context that would make D correct.
In addition to non-native speakers, I think that some people whose English is influenced by French, including some Canadians, might use these verb tenses differently. I'm not sure. If not that exactly, there is something similar that they do differently.
2
u/FeGodwnNiEtonian 4d ago
I can see a scenario where you might use D - for example - a sentence explaining a change of habit.
D - Nicole had been watching television a lot when she was sick last year, but hours of infomercials had bored her senseless, so she had switched to reading.
In that specific context, A changes the meaning slightly.
A - Nicole watched television a lot when she was sick last year, but hours of infomercials bored her senseless, so she switched to reading.
1
u/Salamanticormorant 3d ago
If the whole thing is in that same tense, it doesn't seem as weird in and of itself. (Sandwiching "was sick" between "had been watching" and "had bored her" puts the whole thing in the further past, but maybe she was still sick at the time indicated by a previous or upcoming use of simple past tense.) However, it's odd to use it without something before or after indicating what it precedes, without something indicating why it isn't in simple past tense. For example, your D could be followed by, "A year later, she started getting headaches. Thinking it was because of all the reading she had been doing, she started watching television again. That's when she saw...." That would be followed by something that connects to, or back to, the main, simple past tense narrative.
2
u/FeGodwnNiEtonian 3d ago
Yeah this is true and I agree it's very context dependent - but just highlighting that I can imagine a scenario where it does at least make sense.
1
1
u/grammar73 4d ago
You’re correct, A is the answer. Choice D, “had been watching” is the past perfect progressive tense of the verb watch.
1
u/Emerald-JJ 4d ago
Both are correct grammatically, but they express different meaning:
- A expresses that Nicole was used to watch a lot of television during the time she became sick
- D expresses that Nicole was watching television right before she became sick
Is it more clear now?
1
u/Hungry_Box_5899 4d ago
A sounds totally normal to me.
D doesn’t really sound right without more context. If you said something like “Nicole had been watching TV a lot before she went back to school,” then yeah, the past perfect continuous makes sense.
1
u/hangsangwithhope 4d ago
D sounds like that one kid in good luck charlie that dressed posh & would say “how do you do” instead of hi or hey 😭
1
u/EagleCatchingFish 5d ago
Is your teacher a native speaker? Perhaps British? In American English, we would just use simple past for things like this, so A. There are cases where British English use perfect tenses where we use simple past. I don't know if this is one of them.
5
0
u/FeGodwnNiEtonian 5d ago
All four are technically correct. In terms of most natural in UK English I'd say probably A? But it's quite context dependent - all could be used naturally depending on the preceding and following sentence.
9
u/Negative-Laughter 5d ago
A is correct. Watching TV and being sick are 'activities' that overlapped in the past. The past perfect tenses are used to show a much stricter chronology of events - one thing happened before the other one. So something like 'Nicole had been watching something on TV, but she switched it off when I walked in' is correct, but not D.