I have found this question online. We are supposed to fill in the blanks with either the simple past tense or the past progressive tense.
Answer:
Last year I provided first aid for the first time when I was in Reading to visit a friend of mine. We were sitting in John's garden when we suddenly heard a squeal of tires and a bang. Then there was a lot of shouts and cries. I immediately knew what was going on. I rushed through the garden gate, and when I reached the car I saw two injured persons: The driver was sitting behind the steering wheel, and blood was running from a wound to his head; his wife was lying on the ground beside the open left-hand door. Some neighbors or passers-by helped her, so I opened the other door and carefully dragged him out of the car and put him in a side position. I was talking to him and trying to stop the blood with a paper hanky when the ambulance arrived.
Explanation:
<u>The past progressive tense is used to emphasize an action that lasted for some time in the past.</u> It uses the verb "to be" in its past form (was/were) and a main verb with -ing. The example below helps illustrate it:
- I was cooking lunch when my mother arrived.
<u>The simple past tense is used to express action that happened at a specific time in the past.</u> It is commonly used with expressions of time, such as "yesterday", "last year", "two days ago", etc.
Verbs in the simple past can be regular or irregular. To regular verbs, we simply add -d, -ed, or -ied to form the past. For example: work - worked; arrive - arrived; dance - danced; study - studied.
When it comes to irregular verbs, we must memorize the past form of each. For example: do - did; eat - ate; make - made; swim - swam; speak - spoke.
The sentence below is in the simple past:
- I tried to help the man, but he said he was alright.
