80%

My mother said to me: "Plants grow in soil, so you should put the tree in the garden."

Select correct answer in indirect speech.

My mother said to me that plants would grow in soil, so I should put the tree in the garden.

My mother said to me that plants grow in soil, so I ought to put the tree in the garden.

My mother told me that plants grow in soil so I should put the tree in the garden.

My mother told me that plants grew in soil, so I should put the tree in the garden.

The fact that plants grow in soil is always true, so the tense remains the same.
In the reported speech with the modal verb should, this word does not change.
Plants grow in soil is a general truth, so the tense does not change in the indirect speech.
The fact that plants grow in soil is always true, so the tense remains the same.

Hard B2 | Upper Intermediate Indirect speech Verb tense

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Indirect speech

Direct: "I am tired." → Indirect: She said she was tired. (present → past)
Direct: "I will come." → Indirect: He said he would come. (will → would)
Direct: "I have finished." → Indirect: She said she had finished. (present perfect → past perfect)
today → that day; here → there; tomorrow → the next day

Indirect speech reports someone's words without quotation marks. The mechanism: backshift tenses one step into the past, shift pronouns, and adjust time/place expressions.

Rule: if the reporting verb is past (said, told, asked), shift the reported tense back one step. If the reporting verb is present (says), no shift needed.

Verb tense

	Simple	Progressive	Perfect	Perfect Progressive
Past	worked	was working	had worked	had been working
Present	work(s)	am working	have worked	have been working
Future	will work	will be working	will have worked	will have been working

Verb tense = time (past/present/future) × aspect (simple/progressive/perfect) = 12 forms. Each slot has a specific job — not just "when" but "how the action relates to its time frame."

Key insight: most learners don't need all 12 at once. Simple covers 80% of communication. Add perfect and progressive as needed.

B2 | Upper Intermediate

✅ If I had studied harder, I would have passed. — third conditional
✅ The report is being reviewed by the committee. — passive progressive
✅ Having finished the exam, she left. — participle clause
✅ He denied having taken the money. — complex verb pattern

These are B2 patterns — the CEFR upper-intermediate level. At B2 you handle mixed conditionals, all passive forms, participle clauses, and can argue a point clearly. This is the level most universities and employers require.

Marker: if you can write a structured essay and debate an abstract topic, you're B2.

Hard

Had she not intervened, the situation would have escalated. — inverted conditional
All distractors are grammatically plausible in other contexts
Multiple rules interact (e.g., tense + aspect + modality)
Context determines the answer — no single "rule" is enough

Hard marks upper-intermediate to advanced challenges: B2+, interacting rules, edge cases, plausible distractors, and contexts where pattern-matching fails.

Use "Hard" when Easy/Medium feel trivial and you want to test whether you actually understand a rule versus just recognising surface patterns.