Turn Sentences into Reported Speech
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4 Turn the following sentences into reported speech.
1 He said, 'I'm going to the station.'
...He said (that) he was going to the station....
2 Tina said, 'You should exercise regularly.'
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3 They said, 'We had booked the room before we left.'
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4 Tom said, 'This meal is delicious.'
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5 'I've written you a letter,' she said to her friend.
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6 'We've decided to spend our holidays in Jordan,' they told us.
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7 Jill said, 'I'll go to the bank tomorrow.'
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8 She said to him, 'We've been invited to a wedding.'
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9 She told me, 'You must leave early tomorrow.'
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10 'They've gone out for the evening,' Jessie said to me.
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11 They said, 'We may visit Joe tonight.'
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Animated Video Solution
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Step by Step Written Solution
In this exercise, we'll practice turning direct speech into reported speech. Remember, when we report what someone said, we often need to change pronouns, shift verb tenses back in time, and update time expressions.
Reported Speech Rules
- Backshift Tenses: Present → Past, Past → Past Perfect
- Modals: will → would, shall → should, may → might
- Time/Place: tomorrow → the next day, this → that
Let's look at the second sentence. Tina said, 'You should exercise regularly.' Since 'should' is a modal that stays the same in reported speech, we only focus on the structure. This is often used as advice.
Sentences 2 to 4
In reported speech, we can say: Tina said that I should exercise regularly.
Sentence three says: They said, 'We had booked the room before we left.' Here, we have the past perfect 'had booked'. Since past perfect is already as far back as we can go, the tense remains the same.
For sentence four, Tom said, 'This meal is delicious.' We change 'this' to 'that' and 'is' to 'was'.
Now for sentences five and six. In sentence five, 'she said to her friend' becomes 'she told her friend'. The present perfect 'I've written' shifts back to the past perfect 'she had written'.
Sentences 5 to 6
So it becomes: She told her friend that she had written him or her a letter.
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