Question

Change the speech:
1. I said to them, “Add some sugar to coffee.”
2. She said, “We went out last night.”
3. Hari said, “I was waiting for the bus when he arrived.”
4. The doctor said to the patient, “How are you feeling today?”
5. The man said, “I’d never been there before.”

Answer 1

Hint:
Construct the grammatically correct and the most contextually sound answers. There are certain rules to be followed for converting direct speech to indirect speech in order for it to be grammatically correct.

Complete answer:
 In grammar, there are two types of speech that are recognized - direct and indirect. In direct speech, the sentence is written exactly as the person said it. However, in indirect speech, a third person repeats the sentence that was originally said, so there are many changes in the sentence.

From direct speech to indirect speech, the tense has to be changed from present to past. When you convert a sentence from direct to indirect speech, the tense has to be changed compulsorily. So, to change the speech here, we must change it to simple past tense. As it is a question, in indirect speech, the word order goes back to normal, i.e. the subject comes before the verb. There is also a conditional verb which will be converted into the simple past tense.

Now we know what we are looking for from the answers. Let’s look at the given questions one by one-
1. I said to them, “Add some sugar to coffee.” - This sentence is a command being given. This is relatively simple to convert. So, the verb used will be ‘told’. The order will be converted to an infinitive. So, the answer is - I told them to add some sugar to the coffee.
2. She said, “We went out last night.” - This sentence is a simple declarative sentence. This will be the same tense, except the phrase ‘last night’ will be converted to ‘the night before’, and the subject ‘we’ will change to ‘they’. The answer is - She said that they went out the night before.
3. Hari said, “I was waiting for the bus when he arrived.” - This sentence is in the past continuous tense. This means that it will get converted to past perfect continuous tense. So, the answer is - Hari said that he had been waiting for the bus when he arrived.
4. The doctor said to the patient, “How are you feeling today?” - This sentence is interrogative. This will be conveyed by the verb ‘asked’. The order of the sentence will be made normal so as to not ask a question. So, the answer is - The doctor asked the patient how he was feeling that day.
5. The man said, “I’d never been there before.” - This sentence is already telling us something in the past perfect tense. There will be no change. So, the answer is - The man said that he’d never been there before.

Note:
Simple present tense sometimes gets converted into simple past tense in indirect speech, as it is a reported form of speech. It is not the exact quote someone said.