AI Tutor - Lucy
Learn how to report questions in English, like ‘I asked what you did’. Practise word order, tense changes, and when to use question words in indirect questions.
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'Can' in its simple present form is fine here: the question is being asked 'now' and the information needed in the reply refers to someone's present ability to do an action in the immediate future (for which English often uses the Present tense anyway, as you may well know already).
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There is only room for one 'do' here: ' ... wondered how they did it'. (Even though the original question in the people's minds would have been 'How do they do that?'.)
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Her actual question to herself (until the moment when she remembered!) would have been: 'Where have I left it?' ~ so 'she would have been wondering where she had left it', and then 'remembered where she had ... '.
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The wedding guests were probably asking each other, 'Where will they go?'; so, in indirect terms, they were wondering where the couple WOULD go.
Note the switch of tense; 'would' has a sense of the past about it, whereas 'now' ( = afterwards), the destination is presumably no secret any more. |
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The first item inside an Indirect Question is usually the (grammatical) Subject: in this case, 'the terrorists'.
The active verb comes next. Note again that when a question is reported indirectly, the inversion is turned back round: What the hackers wanted to find out was, 'Where are the terrorists?' ... 'They wanted to know where the terrorists were.' |
Again, the substance of the question goes : Subject + Verb ... .
In this case the question was itself asked in the past; and my buying of the camera had obviously taken place before that, so the tense within the question has to be 'two steps back' ~ into the Past Perfect (or 'Pluperfect', as it is sometimes known). The customs officers' original question would have been 'Where did you buy ... ?', but by the time it is reported, it has undergone at least two major changes! (Turning the front back round, and shunting the tense further into the past.) |
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Some English speakers might prefer the word-order in Answer 2, but neither of the other Answers would be correct.
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We usually wonder 'whether + subject + verb'; the tense of the verb inside the reported question becomes 'would' (even though what they actually asked themselves or each other, would have been: 'Will we / shall we / are we going to ... ?' ~ very obviously concerned with what, at that time, lay ahead of them in the immediate future).
Some speakers might find 'whether' rather pompous, even in such a serious situation; they would probably just say 'if', instead. |
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Answer 3 is the clearest here.
Answer 1 is grammatically fine ~ but most English speakers would find it cumbersome, and say Answer 2 instead ... even though that ends with a preposition (which is regarded as poor, or at best informal, style). Answer 4 has the active verb in front of the Subject, which is wrong (although its meaning remains fairly clear). German (and possibly some other languages) has an advantage here, in that 'what-with / with what' is expressed in a single word ('womit' ~ 'wherewith' in older English). |
This is a slightly complex, but typically 'newsy' final example. It still contains an indirect question, and the shape of that question still puts the Subject (= money ) before the verb ( 'needs' ).
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