Select the most appropriate indirect form of the given sentence.
“What sort of a house are you looking for, Mr. Barrington?” said the house agent.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
The correct answer is option 3 i.e. The house agent asked Mr. Barrington what sort of a house he was looking for.
The reporting verb “said” is changed to “asked” to reflect that a question is being reported.
The direct question “What sort of a house are you looking for?” needs to be transformed into a statement form suitable for indirect speech. This involves changing the pronoun “you” to “he” to match the third-person perspective used in indirect speech.
The tense of the verb changes from “are looking” (present continuous) to “was looking” (past continuous) to align with the past tense of the reporting verb “asked”.
The sentence is restructured to form a complete indirect statement: “The house agent asked Mr. Barrington what sort of a house he was looking for.” This transformation maintains the meaning of the original question while following the grammatical rules for reporting speech.