Question

Fill in the blanks with the most appropriate words.
Last Sunday we _____________ out of the house where we _____________ for five years.
A) Had moved / lived
B) Have moved / had lived
C) Moved / had lived
D) Will move / have lived

Answer 1

Hint: Tenses are used to express the time references, continuation or completeness of an action. Verb tenses are also used to determine when the action took place. Tenses are usually of three types: past tense, present tense and future tense.

Complete answer:
For answering such questions, it is very important to understand the mood of the sentence which can be described by the three forms of the tenses. However, the given sentence in the question ‘Last Sunday we _____________ out of the house where we _____________ for five years’ is in the past form.

Past tense is a tense that describes the action or activity or state of being that has happened in the past. For example: She walked; Tom performed in the show. For regular verbs we add ‘ed’ to the end of the word. For example: walk – walked; clap – clapped and etc.

Let us analyze the given options:
Option A) Had moved / lived – Had moved / lived can be used when the sentence is in the past tense. However, the use of this option ‘had moved and lived’ will be grammatically incorrect and will make the meaning of the sentence wrong. Therefore, this is an incorrect answer.

Option B) Have moved / had lived – Have moved – present perfect tense and had lived indicate the simple past tense. However, ‘have moved’ cannot be used in the first blank because the sentence starts with the ‘last Sunday’ describes the past activity, so, we cannot use ‘have moved’ in the first blank as it makes the sentence grammatically incorrect, ‘had lived’ is the correct for the second blank but to get the correct sentence it is very important to fill the blank correctly. Therefore, this is an incorrect answer.

Option C) Moved / had lived – Moved is the past form of the verb move and this is correctly placed in the first blank and gives the correct meaning of the sentence and ‘had lived’ is used to mean that something happened in the past and that activity has already ended. Therefore, this is the most appropriate option that makes the sentence grammatically correct and therefore, this is the correct answer.

Option D) Will move / have lived – Will move expresses the future perfect tense and we do not require future perfect tense in the simple past tense sentence. As, it is clearly understood that the given sentence in the question is in the simple past tense and to fill the blanks we need the answer to be in past tense. However, the first part of the blank will also take past tense, not the future perfect tense. Therefore, this is an incorrect answer.

Therefore the correct answer is option ‘C’. Last Sunday we moved out of the house where we had lived for five years.

Note: For answering such questions, which are tense based, it is very important to understand the difference between the ‘had’ and ‘have’.
1) Have – present form of the verb ‘to have’ and have as an auxiliary verb it is used in the case of present perfect tense. Have is used for plural nouns and pronouns. For example: I have a headache.
2) Had – past tense of the verb and as an auxiliary verb had is used in the case of past perfect tense. For example: I had a headache last night.