Sports

Cricket on a Sunday morning, netball at noon, the squeak of trainers on a Saturday court — Sri Lankan school life is built around games, and games come with their own English. This unit teaches you how to talk about sport: how to report a match in clean past simple, how to describe the dramatic moment with the right tense, and how to argue, in a 200-word speech, that sport belongs at the heart of a student's life.

The grammar that fits is the past perfect continuous — "we had been playing for only a few minutes when it started to rain" — the tense for an action that had been rolling along for a while before something else interrupted it. You'll also learn the neat trick of substitution ("So do I", "No, we didn't"), which lets you agree and answer without parroting whole sentences back.

Listen to how natural those last lines are: "I love cricket." / "So do I." Nobody says "I love cricket too, I also love cricket" — that's clumsy. English folds the whole repeated idea into two words. And notice "He had been trying to find you all morning… before he went to the match" — one action stretched out in time, then a second action cutting it off. Both of these are the bread and butter of this unit, and the conversation shows you they're things people actually say, not exam inventions.

Picture a wet, muddy boy walking into class. You didn't see him fall — but you know what he'd been up to. "He had been playing in the field." That's the past perfect continuous: it describes an action that had been going on for a while in the past, right up to some later past moment — and often it leaves visible evidence behind (the mud, the tiredness, the rain stopping the game). It's the tense of "this had been happening up until then".

Think of it as a film already rolling when the camera cuts in. By the time we arrive at "yesterday morning", Ayub had already been searching for a while: "He had been trying to find you all morning." The recipe never changes for any subject: had been + the -ing form.

• He had been trying to find you all morning. (stretched up to a point yesterday)
• We had been playing for only a few minutes when it started to rain.
• I had been reading that newspaper every week since January.
• The boys were covered in mud. They had been playing in the field.
• How long had you been waiting when the bus finally came?

Make it negative by adding not: "they had not been practising". Ask a question by moving "had" to the front: "Had you been waiting long?" The one real trap is that some verbs simply refuse the -ing form — verbs about states, not actions: know, understand, believe, belong, own. You can't "be knowing" something. For these, fall back on the plain past perfect: "I had known her for ten years", never "I had been knowing her".

Good English hates saying the same thing twice in one breath. "I love cricket and Nisal loves cricket too" makes a listener wince — you've said "loves cricket" twice. So English snips out the repeat and lets a tiny helping verb carry the meaning: "I love cricket and so does Nisal." The whole idea "loves cricket" hides inside that one word "does".

The trick is to find the helping verb hidden in the first half — do, did, have, will, is, was, can — and stand it in for everything that would otherwise be repeated. To agree, use "So + helper + subject" (So do I, So will he). To answer short, just give the helper: "No, I haven't." It's like pointing at the full sentence instead of writing it out again.

Mind one detail: the helper must match the original verb. If the first half was past ("did you win?"), the short answer stays past ("we didn't"); if it was "have you…", you answer "I haven't". Match the helper and the reply sounds effortless.

A match report almost writes itself once you have these words sorted into the order a game unfolds: the people on and around the field, the equipment they use, the verbs for the action, the result words for the score — and, the part the exam essay really rewards, the values sport teaches (fair play, team spirit, leadership). That last row is what turns a dry report into a persuasive speech.