CBSE Class 10 English Grammar | Sentence Completion Exercise

Fill in the blanks choosing the most appropriate words from the given options.

Once upon a time, there (a)------------------------- a young girl who was very proud of her beauty. One day she (b) ------------------------------- rudely to an angel who was really upset with her. The angel (c) ---------------------------- the girl that she would change into a dirty frog. The girl became sad and (d) ------------------------ crying. She fell at the angel’s feet and (e) ----------------------- for her rude behaviour. The angel was very kind. She felt sorry for the girl and said that she could be free of the curse if she (f) ---------------------- with other frogs for one month.

a) (i) was living (ii) lives (iii) lived (iv) has lived

b) (i) speaking (ii) was speaking (iii) spoke (iv) speaks

c) (i) curses (ii) cursed (iii) was cursing (iv) cursing

d) (i) started (ii) starts (iii) has started (iv) had started

e) (i) apologize (ii) apologized (iii) was apologizing (iv) has apologized

f) (i) stays (ii) stayed (iii) was staying (iv) staying

Once upon a time, there lived a young girl who was very proud of her beauty. One day she spoke rudely to an angel who was really upset with her. The angel cursed the girl that she would change into a dirty frog. The girl became sad and started crying. She fell at the angel’s feet and apologized for her rude behaviour. The angel was very kind. She felt sorry for the girl and said that she could be free of the curse if she stayed with other frogs for one month.

Before answering this type of questions, the first thing you need to do is to find out the time reference. Stories are usually written in the past tense. Here the adverb phrase once upon a time makes it clear that the events mentioned in the passage took place in the past. To talk about past events, we have to use past tenses.

(a) The options lives and has lived are clearly wrong because they are present tense forms. We cannot use present tense forms to talk about past events. The other two options was living and lived are in the past tense. The past continuous form (was living) is only used to talk about events that were in progress at a particular moment in the past. To simply state that something happened in the past, we use the simple past tense.

b) The first option (speaking) cannot be the answer because it is an incomplete verb form. In grammars, -ing forms are called gerunds. They become verbs when they are preceded by a form of be (is, am, are, was, were). The second option was speaking is in the past continuous tense. The past continuous tense is used to talk about situations that were in progress at the time of speaking. To talk about a completely finished past event, we use the simple past tense. The fourth option speaks is clearly wrong because it is in the simple present tense.

Sections in this article

Primary Auxiliaries

Be as an ordinary verb

Be as an auxiliary verb

Be: structures

Do

Have

Have: structures

Modal Auxiliary Verbs