Question

I ......... reading a wonderful book about space travel

Answer 1

Answer:

C. I have just finished reading a wonderful book about space travel.

Explanation:

Consider the following choices:

• A. just finish is incorrect. The ‘just’ should’ve been used with Present Perfect Tense. (Subject + has/have + past participle)
• B. just do finish. Same as A choice, also it wouldn’t make sense or fit the sentence.
• C. Correct structure! Present Perfect is a tense that talks about an event that happened in the past and now it’s still occurring or going on (in general definition) but the tense itself can have many meanings depending on the adverb and additional context. In this case, it means  it happened in the past and you’ve just finished the action.
• D. This is Perfect Continuous Tense (Subject + has/have + been + V-ing.) The difference of continuous and simple perfect is that continuous tends to focus on the action or activity itself while simple perfect tends to focus on the result of activity.

Let’s see some examples:

• They’ve been waiting for 2 hours.
• They’ve waited for quite a long time.

Sometimes, the tense tends to differ the meaning. The first sentence means they’ve waited for 2 hours but continuously waiting and waiting which focuses the action. The second sentence means they’ve waited for a long time but we don’t focus whether if they did continuously wait or not - they could’ve missed a day, two or three days for waiting so the tense can have different meaning depending on context, adverb, etc.