Before you read the story, try to complete the vocabulary task.
Now read the story about a man and a penguin and then answer the questions.
On Monday morning, a policeman was walking his beat. He always walked the same route each day, and people on his beat would stop and say hello and ask him how he was.
On this Monday morning, when he was walking past the supermarket, he met a man with a penguin. The man was carrying some shopping because he had just been in the supermarket.
“Excuse me, sir…” said the policeman.
“Yes,” said the man with the penguin.
“What are you doing with that penguin?”
The man paused for a moment, thought about it, and decided to tell the truth.
“I found him,” he said. “He was looking at the fish in the frozen section of the supermarket.”
“That’s no good,” said the policeman. “That’s no good at all.”
“Oh… no,” said the man. “That’s no good at all.”
“You should take him to the zoo,” said the policeman. “That’s the best place for a penguin in this town.”
“OK,” said the man.
And off they went.
The man walked off with the penguin in the direction of the zoo, and the policeman resumed his beat, thinking to himself that it was a strange thing to meet a penguin. In all the years he had worked on that street, he had never seen anything like it.
The next day, the policeman was back on his beat. He was walking his normal route when a car pulled up. The policeman was surprised to see the man from the supermarket and, in the passenger seat, the penguin.
The policeman was shocked. He was pretty sure that he had told the man to take the penguin to the zoo.
When he found his voice, he asked the man, “What’s going on here? I thought I told you to take that penguin to the zoo.”
“Oh, I did,” said the man. “I took him to the zoo, just as you said.”
The policeman looked relieved.
“Good,” he said. “That’s what I told you to do.”
The man nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “He had such a lovely time. We both had a really good time.”
The man paused.
“Today,” he said, “we’re going to the cinema.”
And he drove off.
______________
- Find examples of regular and irregular past simple verbs.
- Find examples of past continuous verbs.
- Find examples of past perfect verbs.
Why did I write: people on his beat would stop and say hello?
B2 – Narrative tenses