Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow are three words that all of us are familiar with. We love to remember our past, to live for the present and to think about the future. How does the English language help us to relate to the past, the present and the future? The answer is tenses.
Tenses help us to pinpoint the time when an action takes place. Since action is involved verbs come into play and tenses are primarily associated with verbs. The English language has three broad tenses, past, present and future. Each of these is further subdivided into four states representing an indefinite state, continuous or progressive state, perfect state and a perfect continuous state. The use of tense helps us to express a request or an order, a general truth or a recurring or habitual action. In the next three quizzes we take up the continuous or the progressive state and see how it is treated in the present and past tenses.