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Unit 7: The Titanic
Past simple and past continuous

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  1. 1 Nice to meet you!
  2. 2 What to wear
  3. 3 Like this, like that
  4. 4 The daily grind
  5. 5 Christmas every day
  6. 6 Great achievers
  7. 7 The Titanic
  8. 8 Travel
  9. 9 The big wedding
  10. 10 Sunny's job hunt
  11. 11 The bucket list
  12. 12 Moving and migration
  13. 13 Welcome to BBC Broadcasting House
  14. 14 New Year, New Project
  15. 15 From Handel to Hendrix
  16. 16 What's the weather like?
  17. 17 The Digital Revolution
  18. 18 A detective story
  19. 19 A place to live
  20. 20 The Cult of Celebrity
  21. 21 Welcome to your new job
  22. 22 Beyond the planets
  23. 23 Great expectations!
  24. 24 Eco-tourism
  25. 25 Moving house
  26. 26 It must be love
  27. 27 Job hunting success... and failure
  28. 28 Speeding into the future
  29. 29 Lost arts
  30. 30 Tales of survival

Session 2

When telling a story or talking about a true event, we can use both the continuous and simple forms of the past tense. In this session, you will put events from the animated video in order, and then focus on when to use the two forms of the tense.

Sessions in this unit

12345

Session 2 score

0 / 19

  • 0 / 7
    Activity 1
  • 0 / 5
    Activity 2
  • 0 / 7
    Activity 3
  • 0 / 0
    Activity 4
  1. Activity 1
  2. Activity 2
  3. Activity 3
  4. Activity 4

Activity 3

Past simple or continuous?

Test yourself on past tenses

Now it's time to test your knowledge of when to use these two past tenses.

Try the activity

Past simple or continuous?

7 Questions

Choose the grammatically correct sentence from the options

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Next

I bet you'd like to know what Finn did last night... Listen to 6 Minute Grammar to find out and learn some more about past simple and continuous.

Session Grammar

  • When to use past simple
    We use the past simple to describe an action that happened and finished in the past. We commonly use it to give the order of events in a narrative.

    Example
    The Titanic struck the iceberg at 11.40pm.

    When to use past continuous
    We use the past continuous to describe an action that was in progress at a particular time in the past but not completed. We often use this tense with a specific time or together with another shorter event.

    Example
    The passengers were having dinner at 9 o'clock.

    How to make positive past continuous sentences
    The past continuous is made from subject + was/were + verb-ing.

     

View full grammar reference

Session Vocabulary

View full vocabulary reference

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