Question

Identify the tense used in the following sentence:
They had listened to him speak.
A)Simple Past
B)Past Perfect
C)Past Perfect Continuous
D)Present Perfect

Answer 1

Hint: Auxiliary verbs are used to form perfect tense. Words like has, have and had are called auxiliary verbs.

Complete step-by-step answer:

As we can observe, the sentence has an auxiliary verb, ‘had’ in it. Hence, we can say that the tense used is a perfect tense. Thus, we can rule out Option A – Simple Past as a possibly correct answer.
‘Had’ is the past for ‘has’ and ‘have’ which are in present tense. Also as we already know, ‘had’ is an auxiliary verb.
Past perfect uses past tense form of the auxiliary verb + past tense form of the verb. Past tense of a verb can be identified with the suffix ‘-ed’. As we can see, ‘had’ + ‘listen-ed’ follows the same form. Hence, we can consider Option B to be a possibly correct answer.
Past Perfect Continuous uses the past tense form of the auxiliary verb + continuous form of the verb. Continuous form of a verb can be identified by the suffix ‘-ing’. We do not observe this composition in the sentence. Hence, we shall rule out Option C as a possibly correct answer.
Present perfect uses present tense form of the auxiliary verb + present tense form of the verb. We do not observe this composition in the sentence. Hence, we shall rule out Option D as a possibly correct answer.
Thus, we can conclude that Option B is the correct answer.

Note: Present tense signifies an action that has already taken place. Past perfect tense is used to talk about past to past.