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8 He worked in a bank all his life. 9 When I was in England, I drank tea with breakfast. 10 I knew what he meant. 11 I made sure the current was switched off, and then removed the cover plate. The past simple is used to refer to actions or events completed in past time, and the examples above are analogous to sentences 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the present simple. There is no analogous uses of the past tense as in sentence 1, since unicersal truth are independent of time. In 8, his working in a bank was a constant and unchanging feature of his past life (either he is now dead, or he has retired), and this use of the verb form could be classified as past 'neutral'. In 9, the verb expresses an habitual action in the past (past 'literative'). In 10, the verbs belong to the special group not normally used in a progressive form, and they refer to the past 'actual'. Sentence 11 could be either the description in retrospect of a demonstration or experiment: or it could be simply the narration of past events - one of the commonest uses of the past simple (past narrative'). |