Simple Past Exercises
How the simple past works
The simple past describes finished actions and situations at a finished time: yesterday, last year, in 2010, two hours ago.
- Regular verbs:
- base verb + -ed: work → worked, play → played, stop → stopped
- Irregular verbs:
- special forms to memorise: go → went, see → saw, have → had, buy → bought
- Negative:
- didn't + base verb: I didn't see him (not 'didn't saw')
- Question:
- Did + subject + base verb: Did you enjoy the film?
- Signal words:
- yesterday, last night/week/year, ago, in 1999, when I was a child
Examples
We visited my grandparents last weekend.
regular verb + finished time
She went to Italy in 2023 and loved it.
irregular (went) and regular (loved) together
I didn't watch the match last night.
negative — base verb after didn't
Did you call me an hour ago?
question — base verb after did
He bought his first car when he was twenty.
irregular verbs buy → bought, be → was
Practice exercises
Choose the correct form
Select the correct option to complete each sentence.
1.They ___ to the beach yesterday.
2.I ___ my keys, so I couldn't open the door.
3.___ you ___ the new film at the cinema?
4.She ___ come to the meeting because she was ill.
5.We ___ at a small hotel near the station.
Complete the sentences
Type the simple past form of the verb in brackets.
Put the words in order
Click the words in the correct order to build the sentence.
11. Build the sentence:
12. Build the sentence:
13. Build the sentence:
14. Build the sentence:
True or false?
Decide if each statement about the simple past is true or false.
15."I didn't went to school yesterday" is correct.
16.Regular verbs form the simple past by adding -ed.
17.The past of 'be' is 'was' for I/he/she/it and 'were' for you/we/they.
18.We use the simple past with 'since yesterday'.
Frequently asked questions
When do we use the simple past?
Use the simple past for actions and situations that started and finished in the past, usually with a finished time expression: yesterday, last week, two years ago, in 2015, when I was young.
How do I form the simple past of regular verbs?
Add -ed to the base verb: work → worked. Spelling rules: verbs ending in -e add only -d (live → lived); consonant + y becomes -ied (study → studied); short stressed consonant-vowel-consonant endings double the consonant (stop → stopped).
How can I learn irregular verbs?
Learn them in high-frequency groups and practice them in sentences. Patterns help: buy/bring/think → bought/brought/thought; sing/ring/drink → sang/rang/drank. The 50 most common irregular verbs cover most everyday conversation.
Why is it wrong to say 'Did you went'?
Because 'did' already carries the past tense. The main verb returns to its base form in questions and negatives: Did you go? / I didn't go. Only one word per clause needs the past marking.
What is the difference between the simple past and the present perfect?
The simple past reports a finished action at a finished time (I saw that film last week). The present perfect connects a past action to the present, without a finished time expression (I have seen that film).
The simple past explained in depth
The simple past is the storytelling tense of English. Every anecdote, biography, news report and novel leans on it, which makes it one of the highest-value tenses a learner can master. Its concept is refreshingly clear — the action is over, and the time it happened in is over too — but its forms carry two classic difficulties: irregular verbs and the auxiliary 'did'.
Regular verbs are the easy half: add -ed and adjust the spelling where needed. The three spelling rules worth memorising are silent -e verbs adding only -d (arrive → arrived), consonant + y switching to -ied (carry → carried), and one-syllable consonant-vowel-consonant verbs doubling the final letter (plan → planned). Pronunciation of -ed varies between /t/, /d/ and /ɪd/ (worked, played, wanted), which is worth practising aloud.
Irregular verbs are the hard half — around 200 verbs with unpredictable forms, of which perhaps 50 dominate daily speech: go/went, get/got, make/made, come/came, take/took, see/saw. There is no rule that generates them, but there are families with shared vowel changes, and grouping them that way roughly halves the memorisation effort.
The auxiliary 'did' governs negatives and questions, and brings the same logic as 'does' in the present: once the auxiliary carries the tense, the main verb goes back to base form. 'Did she called?' and 'I didn't went' are among the most common learner errors in English — if you catch yourself doubling the past marking, you have found a high-impact habit to fix.
Finally, watch the boundary with the present perfect. Finished-time expressions — yesterday, ago, last year, in 2010 — lock the sentence into the simple past. If the time period is still open (today, this week, ever), English prefers the present perfect. Choosing between those two tenses is such a frequent decision that we dedicate a full exercise page to it.