Question

Fill in the blank with the most appropriate word.
My sister said: “I hope we shall go on an excursion to the lake.”
My sister said that _____ on an excursion to the lake.
A. She hopes we will go
B. She didn’t hope that we shall go
C. She hoped they would go
D. She hoped we were going
E. She hoped we can go

Answer 1

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

Complete answer:
Let’s look at the rules that we need to follow while changing a sentence from direct to indirect speech-
We remove the quotation marks in indirect speech.
The tense of the verb usually changes in the past tense. The pronouns also change depending upon their use in the sentence.
In the given question- We can conclude that X’s sister said that she hoped they would go on an excursion to the lake. Here, we have changed hope to hoped, shall to would and the pronoun ‘I’ to ‘she’.
Now, let’s examine the given options-
Option A. ‘She hopes we will go’ is an incorrect option because we cannot use the present tense ‘hopes’ in indirect speech.
Option B. ‘She didn’t hope that we shall go’ is an incorrect option because we cannot add an auxiliary verb.
Option C. ‘She hoped they would go’ is the correct option because it is given in the past tense form.
Option D. ‘She hoped we were going’ is an incorrect option because we cannot use the continuous tense form.
Option E. ‘She hoped we can go’ is an incorrect option because we cannot use the present tense form of ‘can’. The correct answer is Option ‘c’.

Note: We put direct speech in quotation marks to state the exact words or quotes of a speaker, whereas indirect speech doesn’t include quotation marks because we rephrase the speaker’s wordings.