Question

Choose the indirect speech of the given sentence:
The gardener said, “Don’t pluck flowers.”
a. The gardener asked us not to pluck flowers.
b. The gardener forbade us from plucking flowers.
c. Both A and B.
d. None of the above.

Answer 1

Hint: Direct speech is used when we want to quote what someone has said. This is why we use quotation marks to indicate direct speech. Indirect speech is used when we are explaining what someone has said but not necessarily their word-to-word sentences. Indirect speech does not use quotation marks.

Complete answer:
In the given sentence, the gardener used the words “Don’t pluck flowers”. He is asking some people to not pluck flowers. Therefore, option a is correct, which says that ‘The gardener asked us not to pluck flowers’. Another way of reporting what the gardener said is that he forbade them to pluck flowers. Forbade means to not allow something. By asking the people to not pluck flowers, he did not allow them to pluck flowers. Thus, option b is also correct when it says that ‘The gardener forbade us from plucking flowers’.
Since both options a and b are correct, the correct answer for this question is option c which says that both options a and b are correct.

Thus, option c is the correct answer.
Option d is wrong as it is just for creating confusion that none of the answers are correct.

Note: Even though there is no question mark after the given sentence in the direct speech, it is not wrong to use ‘asked’ while writing the sentence in indirect speech. If there would have been a question mark in the direct speech, the indirect speech will include a ‘whether’ or ‘if’ in the sentence. For example, Rajat asked Neha, “Have you eaten dinner?” The indirect speech will be ‘Rajat asked Neha whether she had eaten dinner’.
We must read all the options before selecting an answer and not stop at the first one just because the first one is correct. Questions which have more than one correct answer such as the given question, need option c to be marked as the correct answer.