Question

Change the given sentence into reported speech:
The Met. office says, "It will rain heavily tomorrow."
A)The Met. office says that it will rain heavily tomorrow.
B)The Met. office says that it would rain the following day.
C)The Met. office says that it would be raining tomorrow.
D)None of the above.

Answer 1

Hint: Reported speech means indirect speech. Indirect speech reports how the words were spoken by the speaker, in the words of the listener.

Complete step-by-step answer:

From the hint given to us, we know that reported speech means indirect speech. Indirect speech reports how the words were spoken by the speaker, in the words of the listener. It uses the simple past tense. The correct option will match with our description of the reported speech.
In the first option, “The Met. office says that it will rain heavily tomorrow.” we observe that future tense is used instead of simple past tense. Hence, option A is not the correct answer, as it does not match the description of indirect speech.
In the second option, “The Met. office says that it would rain the following day.”we observe that simple past tense is used. Hence, option B is possible a correct answer, as it matches the description of indirect speech.
In the third option “The Met. office says that it would be raining tomorrow. ”we observe that it is an ungrammatical sentence. It uses the past form of the verb ‘will’ while referencing to ‘tomorrow’, which is in future. Hence, option C is not the correct answer.
After having observed all the given options and analysing them, we can say that option B is the correct answer.

Note: It is to be noted that when a helping verb like, ‘will’ has been used for the main verb ‘rain’, only the helping word shall be converted to a simple past.