Hardly, Such, Too and a Reported Question
Your English teacher gives a short reordering and transformation quiz. There is no word bank to copy from - each item supplies the words or the source sentence, and you must supply the grammar yourself.
Reorder into one sentence: hardly / she / sat down / had / when / the phone rang
Reorder into one sentence, beginning with the words given: It was ... (such / cold / day / that / we / stayed indoors)
Transform without changing the meaning, beginning with 'The box ...': 'The box was too heavy for me to carry.'
Transform into reported speech: The woman asked me, 'Do you know where the station is?'
The teacher adds: 'In items 1 and 2, marks are lost for word order even when every word is present and the grammar is understood. In items 3 and 4, marks are lost for small omissions that change the meaning.'
1. Complete items 1 and 2, and state the rule that fixes the word order in each - not just the answer.
Read the worked answer
Item 1: 'She had hardly sat down when the phone rang.' Rule: 'hardly ... when' is a fixed pair, never 'than'. The earlier action takes the past perfect ('had sat down') and the later action the past simple ('rang'). 'Hardly' sits after the auxiliary 'had', so 'She hardly had sat down' is wrong. The clause order follows the order of events, not the order of importance.
Item 2: 'It was such a cold day that we stayed indoors.' Rule: 'such' + (a/an) + adjective + noun, then 'that' + result clause. The article 'a' cannot be dropped ('such cold day') and 'that' cannot be replaced by 'so'. Formal alternative: 'It was so cold a day that we stayed indoors' - acceptable, but do not mix the two frames into 'such so cold'.
Why word order carries the marks: in item 1 the meaning is not damaged by 'She hardly had sat down', but the structure is broken; the exam scores the construction, not the intelligibility. State the frame ('hardly + had + past participle + when + past simple') rather than explaining the story.
2. Complete items 3 and 4, and for each give one common wrong version and say exactly what it loses.
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Item 3: 'The box was so heavy that I could not carry it.' Common wrong version: 'The box was so heavy that I could not carry.' The verb 'carry' needs its object; dropping 'it' leaves the sentence incomplete and removes the box as the thing carried. Also wrong: 'too heavy that I could not carry it' - 'too' pairs with 'to', not with 'that'. Note the structural swap being tested: too + adjective + for + object + to-infinitive ⇄ so + adjective + that + subject + cannot + verb.
Item 4: 'The woman asked me whether I knew where the station was.' Common wrong version: 'The woman asked me did I know where the station is.' Four losses in one sentence: the reported yes/no question needs 'if' or 'whether'; there is no auxiliary inversion after it; the tense backshifts ('know' → 'knew', 'is' → 'was'); and the embedded clause 'where the station was' keeps statement order, with no 'did'.
Rule to quote: reporting a question changes the interrogative order back to statement order and moves the tense one step back when the reporting verb is past.
3. Which item cannot be done correctly by translating the Japanese sentence pattern word for word, and why?
Read the worked answer
Item 1. Japanese expresses 'as soon as' with a single connective (～するとすぐに / ～するやいなや) placed after the first verb, and the first clause stays in plain past. English splits the work between two words ('hardly' and 'when') on opposite sides of the first clause, and puts the earlier action in the past perfect - an extra tense that Japanese does not signal there.
A word-for-word transfer produces 'She sat down hardly when the phone rang' or 'She had sat down hardly than the phone rang' - both words are English, the frame is not.
Second candidate: item 4, because Japanese reported questions keep a question particle (か) and do not backshift tense the way English does, which is why 'asked me did I know' appears. Either answer can score if you name the specific mismatch: clause-linking words in English are split, and English adds a tense shift that the source language does not mark.