By the end of this exercise, you can tell the story of a journey in the right order — using the past perfect for what happened first and the simple past for what happened next.
Free Year 9 English practice: Australia's Outback and Uluru, with past perfect and simple past exercises, self-marking gap-fills and a diary writing task.
Read the text and choose the word that fits each gap. The bold verbs show you the past perfect at work.
Uluru is a sandstone rock that rises 348 metres out of the flat red 1 in the middle of Australia. By the time the first European explorers reached it in 1873, the Anangu people had lived in this landscape for more than 30,000 years. For them the rock was never a tourist 2 — it was, and still is, a sacred place.
The explorer William Gosse gave the rock an English name, but he did not know that it had carried the name Uluru for thousands of years already. The land itself was given back to its traditional 3 in 1985, and eight years later both names became 4 together.
Life in the Outback is hard. Temperatures can 5 45°C in summer, and the nearest town may be four hours away by car. Farmers who had waited months for rain sometimes lose everything in a single 6. Children on remote sheep stations study with the School of the Air, a radio and internet school that has taught families in the bush since 1951.
Today about 300,000 people visit Uluru every year. Since 2019 nobody is 7 to climb the rock, because the Anangu had asked visitors for decades to respect their 8 and stay on the ground.
Two things happened in the past. The one that happened earlier takes the past perfect (had + past participle); the later one takes the simple past.
1. When we arrived at the camp, the guides the tents.
2. Last summer we four hours from Alice Springs to Uluru.
3. She couldn’t take a photo of the sunset because she her camera at the hotel.
4. After the sun , the desert became surprisingly cold.
5. In 1985 the government the land back to the Anangu.
6. By the time the rain finally came, the farmer most of his sheep.
7. Our guide said that he never seen so many stars before that night.
8. When I the film about the Outback, I decided to travel to Australia.
After, before, by the time, until and as soon as tell your reader which event came first. Items 5 and 6 come back from earlier units — the passive (New Zealand) and gerunds and infinitives (Ireland).
1. we had booked the flights, we started planning the route.
2. The tour didn’t start everybody had arrived at the bus.
3. the time we reached the campsite, it had got completely dark.
4. She had never eaten kangaroo meat she came to Australia.
5. Uluru back to its traditional owners in 1985.
6. The Anangu asked tourists climbing the rock.
7. As soon as the sandstorm , we packed the tents and drove on.
8. He was exhausted in the evening because he 600 kilometres that day.
You have spent a week in the Outback with your exchange class. Write a diary entry of 6–8 sentences for the class blog that your exchange partner in Adelaide will read, saying what you did on one day and what had happened before it. Use at least three past perfect forms.
• The bus left at five in the morning — nobody had slept much.
• By the time you arrived, the guide had already made breakfast.
• Somebody had forgotten their water bottle.
• You saw the rock change colour after the sun had gone down.
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