Entertainment

Lyrics: Torn

Listening 4 min Lyrics Intermediate

Vocabulary - 7 contextual words

Grammar - Regular and irregular verbs

Pronunciation - Australian

Improve your listening and writing skills by filling in the blanks in the song lyrics. These activities are designed for Beginners and Intermediates to learn new vocabulary related to a specific topic in a quick and fun way.

Torn by Natalie Imbruglia is an excellent opportunity to practice listening skills and to see regular verbs in the past being put into action.

Exercise

Fill in the missing words changed – used – changed – crawled – showed – used – adored – . ⇩

This activity is case sensitive so make sure to use capital letters when needed.

Grammar

Regular and irregular verbs

An English verb can be regular or irregular.
To make the past or past participle form of a regular verb, we use ed:
Walk, walked, walked
Dance, danced, danced
Paint, painted, painted
Work, worked, worked

We make irregular verbs in different ways. There are some patterns, but we cannot use these patterns for all irregular verbs:
1. All three forms are the same (e.g. put, put, put)
2. Two of the three have the same verb form (e.g. sit, sat, sat)
3. All forms are different (e.g. drink, drank, drunk)

We can make some verbs regular or irregular:
Burn, burnt, burnt (irregular)
Burn, burned, burned (regular)
Dream, dreamt, dreamt (irregular)
Dream, dreamed, dreamed (regular)
Lean, lent, lent (irregular)
Lean, leaned, leaned (regular)
Learn, learnt, learnt (irregular)
Learn, learned, learned (regular)

Ever since

Study the example of ever since + [past simple] + [present perfect] used in the video.

Ever since the Gold Rush brought an influx of Chinese workers, San Francisco has held a massive parade to celebrate Chinese New Year.

We use the structure ever since… + [past simple] + [present perfect] to emphasize and talk about a point in time or an event from which an action started and then continued.

Point in time / event:
The Gold Rush brought an influx of Chinese workers to San Francisco.
(past simple)

Continuing action:
San Francisco has held a massive parade.
(present perfect)

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