Grammar exercises

1. Give the past form of the verbs, arrange them according to the pronunciation of the endings:

[t] [d] [id]

to walk, to arrive, to establish, to drop, to spell, to dry, to watch, to complete, to open, to add, to turn, to hurry, to travel, to close, to start, to post, to study, to cover, to want, to play, to stop, to finish, to regret, to work, to equip, to discover, to explore.

2. Replace the infinitives given in brackets by the Past Indefinite Tense. Translate the sentences:

1. The weather is nice today, but it (to be) bad yesterday. 2. I (to get) to the market myself last time, but now I don’t remember how to get there. 3. Five years ago my dad (to sell) his farm and (to buy) a business in a small town. 4. I (to spend) my childhood, boyhood and youth in a little ordinary town on the banks of the Volga. 5. When we (to be) students, we (to like) to walk to college in a fine weather. 6. I’m a doctor now, but two years ago I (to be) a student at a medical college in Moscow. 7. He isn’t playing tennis tomorrow afternoon, he (not / to play) tennis yesterday. 8. The game cricket (to develop) hundreds of years ago from somebody hitting an object with a piece of wood. 9. An American Thomas Edison (to make) the first machine with moving pictures in 1891. It (to be) called a kinetoscope. 10. A famous Russian painter I. Shishkin (not to create) his picture “Morning in the Pine-Wood” alone. The no-less famous painter V. Savitsky (to paint) the bear with her three little cubs. 11. The great Agatha Christie (to write) over 75 detective stories.

3. Put in there was / there wasn’t / was there? / there weren’t / were there?:

1. We stayed at a nice hotel. – Did you? … a swimming pool? 2. I found a wallet in the street but … any money in it. 3. … many people at the meeting? – No, very few. 4. I’m sorry I’m late. … a lot of traffic. 5. The radio wasn’t working because … any batteries in it. 6. I was hungry but … anything to eat. 7. … any letters for me yesterday? 8. … a football match on TV last night but I didn’t see it. 9. The suitcase was empty. … any clothes in it. 10. We didn’t visit the museum. … enough time.

4. Open the brackets, use the Present Indefinite Tense or the Past Indefinite Tense. Translate into Russian.

A) 1. In Ancient Rome people (to use) sticks of bone or metal with a pointed end for writing on waxed tablets. They (to call) those sticks “styles”. Now this word (to mean) a mode of writing or painting. 2. Many thousands of years ago Cyprus (to be) famous for its copper. 3. Renaissance (to mean) “a new birth”, “a revival”. Thus we (to call) the time of the great revival of art and learning which (to cover) the 15^th and 16^th centuries and (to mark) the transition from the medieval to the modern world. 4. Latin (to be) a dead language now, but it (to be) an international language some four centuries ago. 5. Startford-on-Avon (to be) a small town in central England where Shakespeare (to be born) (родиться). 6. The metric system (to be) a system of measures and weights which (to be) first adopted in France. 7. The ancient Greeks (to be) the first to study the stars scientifically. 8. Stars (to be) not bodies that give out light of their own, whereas planets (to shine) only by reflecting light. 9. The American astronaut Neil Armstrong (to become) the first person to set foot on the Moon on July 21, 1969.

B) Your rhythm on the earth (to begin) first with the beat of your heart. When doctors (to measure) the force of the blood they (to hear) its rhythm. The rhythms of electronics (to be) a mystery to men a hundred years ago. But now we (to know) that light and sound and the atom in its orbit, each (to move) in its own rhythm. The earth (to move) in its own rhythm around the sun, as all the planets do.