Question

Fill in the blank with a suitable option.
He asked me if I had ever played the piano.
He asked me, “____________?”
a- Do you ever play the piano
b- Did you ever play the piano
c- Have I ever played the piano
d- Have you ever played the piano

Answer 1

Hint: There are two types of reported speech- Direct and Indirect speech. Direct speech states the original words spoken by the speaker, whereas Indirect speech states the words spoken by a speaker in the past tense form.

Complete answer:
Let’s look at the rules that we need to follow while changing a sentence from indirect to direct speech-
1) We add the quotation marks in the direct speech.
2) The tense of the verb changes in the present tense.
3) The pronouns also change depending upon their use in the sentence.
In the given sentence- The correct direct speech will be; He asked me, “Have you ever played the piano?”
Here, we have used ‘have’ because we can see the use of ‘had’ in indirect speech.
Now, let’s examine the given options-
Option a- ‘Do you ever play the piano’ is an incorrect option because the sentence lacks the use of the auxiliary verb, ‘did’.
Option b- ‘Did you ever play the piano’ is an incorrect option because it is already given in the past tense form of the verb, ‘do’.
Option c- ‘Have I ever played the piano’ is an incorrect option because we can see the incorrect use of the pronoun, ‘I’.
Option d- ‘Have you ever played the piano’ is the correct option because we can see the use of the auxiliary verb, ‘had’ in the indirect speech. The correct answer is Option ‘d’.

Note:
 We put direct speech in quotation marks to state the exact words or quotes of a speaker, whereas indirect speech lacks quotation marks because we have rephrased the speaker’s wordings.