Question

Report the dialogue:
Shopkeeper: Why did you bring this book?
Student: I want to exchange it.
Shopkeeper: Please give me the bill. I will definitely exchange it with a fresh copy.

Answer 1

Hint: Speech can either be direct or indirect, where direct speech refers to the original sentence that the speaker says. Indirect speech on the other hand is the modified version of the direct which is used to convey what someone else has already said in the past. Indirect speech is also known as reported speech.

Complete answer:
To convert a direct speech into reported speech, we use verbs such as ‘said’, ‘told’, ‘asked’, ‘replied’, etc. to begin a sentence. We then change the direct speech into its past tense. Also, we need to change all the pronouns from the first and second person to the third person. So words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘us’ will change into he, she, his, her, them, they etc.

The first sentence can be written as ‘The shopkeeper asked the student why he had brought that book.’ We can see that ‘you’ is replaced with ‘he’; ‘did’ is replaced with ‘had’; ‘bring’ is replaced with ‘brought’ and ‘this’ is replaced with ‘that’.

The second sentence can be written as ‘The student said that he wanted to exchange it.’ Here, we have replaced ‘I’ with ‘he’ and ‘want’ with ‘wanted’.

The last sentence can be written as ‘The shopkeeper asked the student to give him the bill and said that he would definitely exchange it with a fresh copy.’ Here, we replaced the word ‘me’ with ‘him’; ‘I’ is replaced ‘he’ and ‘will’ is exchanged with ‘would’.

It should also be noted that when there are two statements being said by the speaker consecutively, we can connect both the statements in the indirect speech by using conjunction (in this case, ‘and’).

Therefore, the final answer is: -
“The shopkeeper asked the student why he had brought that book. The student said that he wanted to exchange it. The shopkeeper asked the student to give him the bill and said that he would definitely exchange it with a fresh copy.”

Note: Reported speech is called so because it is used when we are reporting to someone about what a person said to another person. It can be used in verbal communications, or in writing in letters, articles, emails etc. We do not use the question mark or exclamation mark while reporting a certain speech.