General English Level 4 Version 2.1 © 2004 acl Pty Ltd GELEV4 Unit 04 Topic 03.doc  LANGUAGE FOCUS 03 Tag questions in past tenses We use tag questions for two reasons. 1. Checking Jackie says: Jackie: You were OK, weren't you Lucas? Jackie thinks and hopes Lucas was OK, but she isn't sure. We use tag questions when we think we know the answer but we are not sure and we want to check. 2. Asking the other speaker to agree Jackie says: Jackie: Yeah and the parachute fell on top of you and you almost drowned, didn't you Ming? Jackie knows the answer (Ming has already told her the story). She is just asking Ming to agree with her and then continue the story. We use tag questions when we want the other speaker to agree with us. Often we do this because we want the other speaker to continue speaking. We are encouraging them to go on. Information We call the last part of a tag question, for example: weren't you?, didn't it?, didn't you? a question tag. We can form tag questions in all tenses. The tense in the tag should match the tense in the question. Examples 1. Present: You don't like rock climbing, do you? 2. Past: He was really high up, wasn't he? When the first part of the sentence is positive, we use a negative question tag. Look Positive sentence Negative question tag Answer The rider fell off, didn't he? Yes, he did. It rained all day yesterday, didn't it? No, it didn't. You were going very fast, weren't you? No, I wasn't. When the first part of the sentence is negative, we use a positive question tag. 131