Grammar Transformation: Present Perfect with 'since' versus Past Simple
María is taking the PAU English exam in Huesca. In the grammar section, item 7 asks her to rewrite the sentence without changing its meaning: 'The last time she visited her grandmother was in 2019.' She must begin with 'She...'. She has already answered six transformations: two passive, one reported speech, one conditional, one comparative, one modal. She has 4 minutes for this item and the next one. Her first instinct is to write 'She didn't visit her grandmother in 2019', but she notices the original says 'the last time' and 'was in 2019', which implies she has not visited since then. She also wonders whether to use 'since' or 'for' with 2019. The exam instructions say the second sentence must have the same meaning and use the word given in capitals if provided; here no word is given, only the opening 'She...'.
1. Write the correct transformation beginning with 'She...' and explain the tense and preposition choices.
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She hasn't visited her grandmother since 2019. The original means that the most recent visit was in 2019 and there have been no visits after that. The present perfect negative ('hasn't visited') expresses a situation that started in the past and continues up to now. Use since with a point in time (2019), not for, which needs a duration (for five years). 'She didn't visit her grandmother in 2019' only reports one past year and loses the implication that 2019 was the last visit. The opening 'She...' and the time expression 'the last time... was' are the clues that a present perfect with 'since' is required.
2. A classmate writes 'She has visited her grandmother since 2019.' Explain why this is wrong and what meaning it creates.
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It reverses the meaning. The original says the last visit was in 2019, so there were no visits after 2019. 'She has visited her grandmother since 2019' means she visited at least once after 2019 and possibly regularly up to now. That contradicts 'the last time... was in 2019'. The positive present perfect with 'since' describes repeated or continued visits; the negative form is needed to express the gap. This is a classic PAU trap: students focus on the time expression and forget to keep the negative implication of 'the last time'.
3. Explain why 'She didn't visit her grandmother in 2019' is not an acceptable answer even though it is grammatically correct.
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It is grammatically correct but not equivalent in meaning. 'She didn't visit her grandmother in 2019' says only that no visit occurred during that year. It says nothing about visits before or after 2019. The original states that 2019 was the last visit, which implies visits may have happened before 2019 and none after. The transformation task requires the second sentence to have the same meaning, so you must preserve the 'last time' implication. In the PAU, a grammatically correct sentence that changes the meaning receives no mark for that item.