Question

Fill in the blank with the most appropriate word:
“What are you talking about?” Dick asked me what _______________________________.
a. am I talking about
b. I was talking about
c. he is talking about
d. was he talking about

Answer 1

Hint: The given set of sentences is a question from direct and indirect speech. When a present tense is converted into indirect speech, it is written in the past tense.

Complete answer:
The words in the quotation marks form the direct speech. We have to fill in the blanks with indirect speech. The answer will be Dick asked me what I was talking about. Thus, the correct

> Option is option b. The present tense in the direct speech, that is ‘are’, has been converted into the past tense ‘was’. Also, the pronoun ‘you’ has been converted into ‘I’. Thus, the indirect speech is correct.
Now let us see why the other options are wrong.

> Option a is wrong because when a direct speech in the present tense is converted into an indirect speech, it becomes a past tense. In option a, ‘are’ has been used which indicates present tense.

> In option c, the person to whom the indirect speech is addressed is wrong. In the direct speech, the pronoun ‘you’ referred to me and not to Dick himself. The speech was by Dick and he was addressing me and not himself.
> In option d, the mistake again is that the pronoun ‘he’ has been used. The person referred to in the direct speech is not Dick but me.

Note: The change of tense while converting from direct speech to indirect speech must be noted. All present tenses changes into past tense, so option a will not be the correct answer at any cost.