Change the following into Indirect speech by choosing the appropriate option from below :
"What did you miss the most when you were in London?" Sheela asked Meeta.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Sheela asked Meeta what she had missed the most when she had been in London.
Indirect speech of a wh-question:
| Change | Direct | Indirect | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question word | “ ” (quotation marks) | what | “What” joins the two parts. No “that”, no question mark. |
| Word order | What did you miss | what she had missed | The question becomes a statement: subject before verb (what she had missed), and the helping verb “did” disappears. |
| Pronoun change | you | she | “You” (Meeta) becomes “she”. |
| Tense change | did miss, were | had missed, had been | The reporting verb “asked” is in the past tense, so the tenses inside move one step back: simple past “did miss” becomes past perfect “had missed”. “Were” becomes “had been”. |
| Full sentence | “What did you miss the most when you were in London?” Sheela asked Meeta. | Sheela asked Meeta what she had missed the most when she had been in London. |
Example: “Where did you go?” he asked me. → He asked me where I had gone.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Sheela asked Meeta what you have missed the most when you are in London. — Incorrect.
- "You" is not changed to she.
- The tenses move forward to the present instead of back to the past perfect.
Option 2: Sheela asked Meeta what she had missed the most when she was being in London. — Incorrect. "Was being" is the past continuous of be, which is not used for being in a place.
Option 3: Sheela asked Meeta what she have missed the most when she is London. — Incorrect.
- "She have" breaks subject-verb agreement.
- The tenses are not changed to the past perfect.
- "is London" drops the preposition in.