Question

He said that the horse had died in the night. Change into direct speech.

• i. He said, "The horse would die in the night".

• ii. He said, "The horse died in the night".

• iii. He said, "The horse had died in the night".

• iv. None of these

• A. ii
• B. iii
• C. iv
• D. i

Answer 1

Answer:

A. ii

• The indirect sentence is: "He said that the horse had died in the night."

• To convert it to direct speech, you remove "that" and put the original words back into quotation marks. The past perfect tense ("had died") is changed back to the simple past tense ("died"), as this is how it would have originally been spoken.

• Thus, the correct form is:
  "He said, 'The horse died in the night.'"

• This is because in direct speech, simple past tense is used for something that happened in the past.