Office Talk - Разговор в офисе
Learn to talk about what you did at work in the past in English.
In this beginner English lesson you will see an employee talking to his boss about his work the week before when the boss was away. You will learn to use the past continuous tense to ask questions and give answers.
Study points
This lesson is all about past continuous questions and answers.
What were you doing last week? I was studying for my exam. We were working all week.
First we will review some words about work. How are the clients at your job? Clients are people who buy products or services. In your job, do you have to talk in front of many people? This is called a presentation. Sometimes we use pictures in a presentation. A projector shows the pictures on the wall.
Watch
We are going to watch a video. A worker is talking to his boss.
Learn
Lets talk about the grammar. Sometimes, we use past actions that continued for some time. We show that they continued using the past continuous. Read these sentences:
"I was studying last week. They were studying last week." Notice how they use to "to be" in the past: "was" and "were". "Was" is for "I",
"he", "she" and "it". "Were" is for "you", "we" and "they". We add "-ing" to the main verb. This is the past continuous. It shows that the action was continuing in the past.
Try
I will show you sentences from the video with some words missing. Read these sentences and guess which works are missing:
"So tell me, what _____ you doing when I was away last week?" "Well, I _____ working pretty hard all week."
Let try another:
"What ____ John doing during the presentation?" "He ____ helping me with the projector".
Review points
Today we have practiced past continuous questions and answers. "What were you doing last week?" "We were working all week".