| 释义 |
Past simple (I worked)
Past simple: form
For regular verbs, we add -ed to the base form of the verb (work–worked) or -d if the verb already ends in e (move–moved).
+ | I, she, he, it, you, we, they | worked. | − | I, she, he, it, you, we, they | (full form) did not | work. | I, she, he, it, you, we, they | (short form) didn’t | ? + | DidI, she, he, it, you, we, they | work? | ? – | (full form) DidI, she, he, it, you, we, theynot | work? | (short form) Didn’tI, she, he, it, you, we, they |
In regular one-syllable verbs with a single vowel followed by a consonant, we double the final consonant when adding -ed to make the past simple: stop: The bus stopped suddenly.
plan: Who planned this trip?
See also:
Spelling and verb forms
Regular verbs
Past simple: pronunciation of -ed
For regular verbs, there are three possible pronunciations of -ed endings.
/d/ | /t/ | /ɪd/ | after all vowel sounds and after voiced consonants (except /d/) /m/ /n/ /ŋ/ /l/ /g/ /dʒ/ /z/ /b/ /v/ | after all voiceless consonants (except /t/)/k/ /p/ /f/ /s/ /ʃ/ /tʃ/ | after /d/ and /t/ | cried, tried, hurried, weighed, smiled, planned, judged, sneezed, lived | picked, hopped, laughed, crossed, pushed, watched | decided, ended, landed, started, visited, waited |
See also:
Spelling and verb forms
Past simple: irregular verbs
Many verbs are irregular. Here are some common ones. Each one has to be learnt. The verb form is the same for all persons (I, you, she, he, it, we, they), and we make questions and negatives with irregular verbs in the same ways as for regular verbs.
irregular verb | example in the past simple | be | She was afraid.
| begin | The meal began with soup.
| come | Everyone came to my house for the weekend.
| do | Look what I did!
| eat | The birds ate all of the bread.
| fly | We flew from New York to Mexico City.
| have | She had such a good time.
| know | We knew each other well in college.
| read | I read that book last year. (/red/)
| sing | Her sister sang a beautiful song at the party.
| tell | He told me a funny story.
| wake | When she woke up, it was already 1 pm!
| write | I wrote him an email to explain why I couldn’t meet him.
|
See also:
Irregular verbs
Verbs
Table of irregular verbs
Past simple: uses
Definite time in the past
We use the past simple to talk about definite time in the past (often we specify when something happened, e.g. yesterday, three weeks ago, last year, when I was young): Did you watch that film yesterday?
He left at the end of November.
When they were young, they hated meat.
See also:
Present simple (I work)
Single or habitual events or states
We use the past simple to talk about single or regular (habitual) events or states in the past.
Events that happened once | He felloff his bike and his friends took him to a doctor.
She ranout and she phoned my brother.
| Events that happened more than once | They travelled to Italy every summer and always stayed in small villages on the coast.
As children, we played all kinds of games on the street.
| States | She looked a bit upset.
Did you feel afraid?
|
When we use the past simple to refer to habitual events, the meaning is similar to used to: I did a lot of travelling when I was younger. (or Iused to doa lot of travelling when I was younger.)
See also:
Used to or would?
The past simple with no time reference
Sometimes there is no time expression when the past simple is used. This happens especially when we know the time: Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. (From our general knowledge, we know that Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa a few hundred years ago.)
Compare
Do you know Grace? She was in my class at primary school.
| Do you know Grace? She was in my class at primary school in the 70s.
| Past simple without a definite time reference: both speakers know when this time was and do not need to say it. They know each other well. | Past simple with a definite time reference: the speaker is not sure if the listener knows when she was at primary school. |
Past simple and the order of events
When one past event happens after another, the first one mentioned in the past simple happened first and the second one happened next, and so on. If we change the order of the verbs, this changes the meaning.
Compare
[event 1]I turned off the light and [event 2]got into bed.
| The first event in the past simple happened first. The second event in the past simple happened second, and so on. | [event 1]I got into bed and [event 2]turned off the light.
|
|