Tenses work as the heart of English grammar, without which there is no soul in it. It’s not very difficult to form a meaningful sentence. One just have to know the rules, person’s role and the tense. A tense is a category that expresses time reference with reference to the moment of speaking. The time of action will not always be the same. So according to the time, the tense changes.
What is Simple Past Tense?
The Simple past or past Indefinite tense is used for a single or a sequence of event that happened in the past, and also for the actions of the past. It can also be used to refer to a state in the past.
Note: Past simple tense is also called Past indefinite Tense.
We have a sentence structure formula for Simple Past / Past Indefinite Tenses is (Subject + past tense of the verb (2nd form of verb) + object)
Let us understand this formula with the help of an example “I cooked the rice”. Here ‘I’ is the subject, ‘cook’ + ‘ed’ to form ‘cooked’ to show a past action and ‘rice’ is the object.
Examples of Simple Past Tense Sentences
Following are some examples of sentences written in Simple past tense:
- I wrote the article
- We wrote the book’s main headings
- I taught English.
- She wrote the entire novel in one day.
- They wrote the lyrics for their song.
- It wrote that “Everything happens for a reason.”
- She booked the tickets for concert.
- Dustin ate the entire bowl of rice for lunch.
- Shane starved the entire evening without food.
- Loather invaded the entire town with his army.
- I wrote the book.
- We played.
- She cooked the rice.
- They wrote the article.
- I waited for the whole day.
- He worked really hard.
- He kept it under the table.
- Gaurav wanted a glass of milk.
- John ran away from home.
- We slept at four in the morning.
- He played football for about 5 hours.
- She kept that in the Almira.
- I missed the bus.
After having a look at these many examples let us now see how past indefinite tense works with active and passive voices
Active Voice Form of Past Indefinite
The Sentence Structure formula for past indefinite sentences when they are is active form is (Subject + past tense of the verb + object)
Let us see some examples to see how the above formula works
- I taught English
- She wrote a novel
- He read the book.
Passive Voice Form of Past Indefinite
Sentence Structure formula for past indefinite sentences when they are is passive form is (Object as subject + was / were + past participle tense of the verb + by + subject as object
Let us look at some examples to see above formula working.
- English was taught by me.
- A novel was written by her.
- The book was read by him.
I hope this article has given you a good insight about past indefinite tense or what we usually call simple past tense. Make sure you follow the structure rules given to help you form correct sentences.
You can use this article as an extensive guide which will help you in building a sentence perfectly. In this website, there’s an individual section for every type of tense exclusively. So go through each of it to have a wider picture.
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