Question

Lane _____ through the morning papers when the telephone _____. Choose the correct words to fill in the blanks.
A. was looking/rang
B. were looking/rang
C. are looking/rang
D. have looked/ring
E. looked/is ringing

Answer 1

Hint:Any word that can be used to describe an action, state, or occurrence is a verb. It forms the main part of the predicate of a sentence. In other words, verbs are words that describe ‘work’ like- hear, talk, drink etc. Now that we know what verbs are, let us move on to their different forms.
 In different situations, people have to adjust with their surroundings. Similarly, a verb also has to ‘adjust’ itself in different sentences. For example, the only difference between the sentences, ‘I love you’, and ‘I loved you’ is that the speaker (I) loves ‘you’ (to whom it is being spoken) in the former sentence whereas in the latter, the speaker used to love ‘you’ (listener).

Complete answer:
1. Here we are going to check each option one by one so that we can detect the correct option containing the proper form of the verb.
2. We know that the basic principle of subject-verb agreement is that the subject should go along with the verb. So, if the subject doesn’t agree with the verb, then the sentence becomes grammatically incorrect. If we look at the first option, we can see that the subject (Lane) agrees with the verbs (was looking; rang). Hence, this option is correct.
3. The other options are incorrect because of two reasons. Firstly, the subject-verb agreement cannot be seen. Secondly, more than one tense has been used in the sentences resulting in grammatical errors.

Hence the correct answer is option ‘A’.

Note: We use verbs to describe any action, state or occurrence taking place or being done by the subject. Some verbs are ‘walk’, ‘talk’, ‘laugh’, ‘see’, ‘cry’, ‘dance’, ‘play’ and so on. You can notice that in the first case, it is used past continuous tense. Evidently, it is quite clear that we have to use another past tense and that is most suitable for Simple Past Tense.