Grammar › Past Perfect Continuous

Past Perfect Continuous: positive sentences

450 fill-in-the-gap exercises, 45 tests of ten

Had been for every subject, then the verb with -ing.

The pattern

Nothing agrees with the subject — had been is the same for everyone:

I had been working. She had been working. They had been working.

The short form is ’d been: I’d been, she’d been, they’d been.

The past moment is usually named

Because the tense measures up to a point, the sentence almost always says which point:

• By the time the guests arrived, she had been cooking for five hours.
• He had been living in Oslo before he moved here.

Without that anchor the sentence feels unfinished.

for and since

Same split as everywhere: for with a length, since with a starting point.

They had been driving for eight hours / …since six in the morning.

Two steps back in a story

A narrative in the Past Simple can step back twice — once for an earlier event, once for an activity that filled the time before it:

She opened the door. He had been sitting there since noon, and he had not moved.

All forms

Examples

Taken from the 450 sentences in this drill. The answer is highlighted.

• The students had been working on their essays all day and were relieved when they finally finished.
• They had been playing basketball every evening before one of them injured their ankle.
• The team had been practicing hard all season before they won the championship.
• I had been waiting for that job for months before they finally offered it to me.
• He had been taking the exam for three hours before he finished.
• She had been studying English for years before she became fluent.
• He had been searching for a job for months before he finally got an offer.
• She had been writing letters to him for years before they met.
• The chef had been cooking the meal for hours before serving it to the customers.
• We had been reading that book for days before we finally finished it.
• She had been doing her homework before watching TV.
• We had been watching a movie for an hour when the projector suddenly stopped working.

Mistakes to avoid

Other forms of Past Perfect Continuous