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Silak12 Posted 14 years ago
Grammar

Was Supposed/expected to be or do?

Hi! everyone.Could you help me with this problem. Actually I have already asked this question here a few times in different ways but could not get a good answer that could make me understand it,so now I am putting it again here.My question is about the use of "was supposed/expected to do or be"
I came to know from this site BBC Learning English that "Was supposed to do=should have done" and "was supposed to be =should have been"(Is this correct?) If it is then tell me,does "was supposed to do or be" always mean that something was planned but didn't happen for some reason as "should have been or done" implies?
Or sometimes it means things actually happened in the past like I am going to give an example below-I read this para in my story book's story "a man who was a hospital" which is like this "The disease writer discovered he didn't have was house maid's knee pain.It was the disease that men were not expected to suffer from"

If I take the green coloured phrase as the rule BBC Learning site told me then "were not expected to suffer from=were not supposed to suffer from which is equal to =should not have suffered from. And this phrase "Men should not have suffered from" means men did suffer from the disease. And this disease was common in men.(Please help me in this matter this entangles me allot)
Thanks!
  

Top answer

"SUPPOSED TO DO something" means "SHOULD DO something" or "SHOULD HAVE DONE something". "I was SUPPOSED TO wash the dishes last night" means that I SHOULD HAVE washed them. That might have been because it's my normal duty to wash them every night, or because I was asked to wash them, or some other reason.

  • "SUPPOSED TO DO something" means "SHOULD DO something" or "SHOULD HAVE DONE something".
  • "I was SUPPOSED TO wash the dishes last night" means that I SHOULD HAVE washed them.
  • That might have been because it's my normal duty to wash them every night, or because I was asked to wash them, or some other reason.
  • " loosely implies that I DID NOT wash the dishes last night, unless you say otherwise (for example "I washed the dishes because I was SUPPOSED TO").
  • This is simply because if I say "I was supposed to wash the dishes last night", you can assume that I DID NOT wash the dishes, otherwise there would be no reason for me to say that.
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2 Answers
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"SUPPOSED TO DO something" means "SHOULD DO something" or "SHOULD HAVE DONE something".
"I was SUPPOSED TO wash the dishes last night" means that I SHOULD HAVE washed them. That might have been because it's my normal duty to wash them every night, or because I was asked to wash them, or some other reason.
"WAS supposed to ..." loosely implies that I DID NOT wash the dishes last night, unle
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Hi! Kris Thanks for answering.What do you think if I use Should have been =supposed to have been instead of simple supposed to be for things Which didn't happen,will it be right? and because "was supposed to do" doesn't imply proper sense of whether the work was done or not.What do you think?

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