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Anonymous Posted 12 years ago
Grammar
PastSimpleContinuous
Hello,
1: The phone rang while I was cooking.
2: The phone was ringing while I was cooking.
Are both them grammatically OK?
1: The phone rang while I was cooking.
2: The phone was ringing while I was cooking.
Are both them grammatically OK?
Top answer
1. is correct. 2.
- 1.
- is correct.
- 2.
- is correct from a purely technical-grammatical point of view, but it doesn't really make sense.
- This indicates that you were cooking and the phone was ringing, and that there is no interrelation between the two, like saying it was pouring rain outside while I was cooking.
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4 Answers
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1. is correct. 2. is correct from a purely technical-grammatical point of view, but it doesn't really make sense. This indicates that you were cooking and the phone was ringing, and that there is no interrelation between the two, like saying it was pouring rain outside while I was cooking.
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(2) sounds to me as if the phone was ringing (unanswered) for much or all of the time that you were cooking, which is unlikely because the activity of cooking usually lasts quite a while. "The phone was ringing as I entered the office", for example, is OK because "as I entered the office" is not something with a long duration.
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AnonymousPastSimpleContinuousActually, there is no such thing as the Past Simple Continuous tense (if that's indeed what you are saying).
It's either Past Simple (rang) or Past Continuous (was ringing).
CJ
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