Question

“Are you free now?” He asked her if ____________ then. (Fill in the blank with the most appropriate word.)
(a) I was free
(b) is she free
(c) she was free
(d) was she free

Answer 1

Hint: The students should try and understand when the situation or event in the sentence is happening. Then the students should go through the options and infer which option is in correspondence with the timing of the event in question.

Complete answer:
Indirect speech (or reported speech) is a form of speech used to express what another has said; often involves a change in tense. For example, if we were to change "Fred says "I will do the housework"." into reported speech it would become "Fred said that he would do the housework."
In the given question, we have to find out which of the options given to us is in third person and in past tense (as second person pronouns change to third person in indirect narration, and simple present changes to simple past).

Let us thus analyze the options given to us in this question:
(a)'I was free', refers to the first person pronoun ‘I’.
Therefore, option (a.) is incorrect as we need a third person pronoun.

(b)‘is she free', refers to ‘is’ which is present tense.
Therefore, option (b.) is incorrect as we need past tense.

(c)‘she was free', is correct as is in third person and in past tense which is needed because second person pronouns change to third person in indirect narration, and simple present changes to simple past.

(d)‘was she free', refers to a wrong order of narration in indirect speech.
Therefore, option (d.) is incorrect as it is grammatically incorrect.

Note: In this question, it will be helpful for the student to recall the concept of tense. Tense is a grammatical category of verbs used to express distinctions of time. There are three tenses- past, present, and future.