By saharsh. C. Commons

It was a hot, steamy day of May, 1982. I was 14 years old and lived with my parents and my sister in a nice small village in Iowa. My father worked at a huge consulting company 10 miles away. My mother was a housewife, so she didn’t work outside.

 

My sister and I were coming home from school when something surprising and terrible occurred. We passed the cinema of the town, and turned left when, all of a sudden, it started to rain heavily and we could hear a strong wind blowing. My sister and I were sitting together at the back of the bus and got really frightened because we didn’t know what was happening. We could only see people running here, there and everywhere.

 

The storm continued for a while, then it stopped, and nothing could be heard, the sky turned orange. As time passed, things became more and more amazing. We had never had such an exciting experience before. But the worst was to come… Then we heard it and looked through the windows of the bus. We all realized that the immense spinning column was coming towards us. The driver told all of us to go to the rear and I could see nothing. My schoolmates started to cry and ran to our seats. I got up and told the excited screaming children to shut up… All of them were shocked.

 

By Stuck in Customs. C. Commons

As we had seen on TV, it was a fierce immense brown wall of dust, objects, and even animals from time to time. Now I can remember it as something oddly fascinating to look at the houses disappearing along with the rest of the objects in its path.

 

Suddenly, when the tornado was about to reach the bus, it turned right. We all stopped screaming and looked at it completely engrossed. It kept on devastating the long street of the town. When it was far away, we got off the bus and could see our parents running to pick us up. They had a very worried look on their faces. Suddenly we thought of our mum. She was at home, and the tornado was leading there. My father rang her but nobody answered the phone. When we got home, there was no house. My mother was standing in front of the place where it had once been, crying and really excited, but she was safe.

 

To our surprise, our house was the only one completely destroyed in our neighbourhood. Our neighbour across the street came out and with a friendly penetrating voice told us he had never seen such a dreadful thing!

 

Nowadays, we live in the same place but our house is bigger and far more resistant.

Read the passage paying special attention to the tenses used. Underline the verbs in the Past Simple and those in the Present Simple. If you click below, you'll find out some expressions used in the passage.

Click here to get the answer to the exercise.

When using the Past Simple tense, we must distinguish between two kinds of verbs: regular and irregular ones. Remember that regular verbs form the Past and Past Participle forms by adding -ed to the bare infinitive. On the contrary, irregular verbs have their own past and past participle. It is quite frequent that we forget to add suffix -ed to the bare infinitive to form the Past Simple of regular verbs and not to know the forms of irregular verbs because they haven't been learnt properly.

We encourage you to learn irregular verbs little by little! If you forgot to get a good and complete list of them, click on the picture on the left and you'll have the chance to get it right now.

It is also very important that you remember that in English the third person singular only adds -(e)s in the present tenses. So, to ask questions and do negative sentences in the Past Simple tense, we only use did (except with modal verbs and the verb to be, of course), which is the Past Simple of the verb to do. The main structure of the sentences doesn't change. Remember:

Draw two charts similar to the ones above and put the following sentences from the text in the interrogative and negative forms.

Things became more and more amazing / They had a very worried look on their faces / Nobody answered the phone / Our neighbour across the street came out

Elaboración propia. Derechos cedidos a la Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Extremadura

However, it is very easy to use them. Have a look at the following sentences:

Recognize and underline all the Present and Past Participial adjectives you can find in the passage above.

Click below to see the chart of these adjectives, and click here if you want to see them in context.

When Present and Past Participial adjectives as well as the other adjectives that appear in the text are in attributive position, that is are placed in front of a noun, they normally follow a concrete order. Click here to remember the correct order of the most frequently-used adjectives according to type.

Now, have a look at the following chart with examples of noun phrases from the passage.

a fierce immense brown wall of dust / a friendly penetrating voice