The Diary Entry: Time Words and Reported Speech
Your English teacher returns your diary entry with four underlined parts. The entry begins: 'Yesterday I (1) have visited my host family's farm in Toyama. I (2) have never seen so many apples before. My host mother said she (3) will teach me how to make jam, but in the end we (4) didn't have enough time.' The teacher writes: 'Two of these are correct, and two are not. One incorrect choice is wrong because of a time word; the other is wrong because of reported speech.' She also asks you to look at this pair: 'I was very tired after the farm work.' / 'I was very tiring after the farm work.' You have 10 minutes and may not use a dictionary. The teacher wants reasons, not just corrected sentences.
1. Which of (1)–(4) are correct as written? Explain each incorrect one using the teacher's two clues.
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Correct as written: (2) 'have never seen' and (4) 'didn't have.'
Incorrect: (1) 'have visited.' It is wrong because of the time word 'Yesterday.' The present perfect ('have visited') connects a past action to the present and is not used with a specific finished past time. Use the simple past: 'Yesterday I visited...'
Incorrect: (3) 'will teach.' It is wrong because of reported speech. The reporting verb 'said' is past, so the future 'will' shifts to 'would': 'she would teach me.' The meaning is a future-from-the-past promise, not a present future.
2. Choose the correct sentence from the pair and explain the difference between tired and tiring in this context.
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Correct: 'I was very tired after the farm work.'
'Tired' describes how I felt-the person experiences the feeling. 'Tiring' describes the thing that causes the feeling: the farm work was tiring.
In 'I was very tiring,' the sentence says I caused tiredness in other people, which is not the intended meaning. The -ed adjective usually describes a person's feeling; the -ing adjective describes the quality of a thing or situation.
3. Rewrite sentence (1) correctly, then explain why sentence (2) does not need the same change even though both use 'have.'
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Rewrite: 'Yesterday I visited my host family's farm in Toyama.'
Sentence (2), 'I have never seen so many apples before,' can keep the present perfect because it talks about experience up to now, not a finished past time. 'Before' means 'in my life before now,' and there is no specific past time such as 'yesterday.'
The presence of 'have' is not the problem; the problem in (1) is combining present perfect with 'yesterday.'