5 exercises — practise describing cancelled or revised plans and predictions with future-in-the-past forms.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly describes a past plan that was later cancelled?
"We were going to launch the feature flag on Friday, but we postponed it after the security review" is correct: "was/were going to" expresses a past intention or plan, and pairing it with "but" clearly signals the plan did not happen as intended, which fits a retrospective describing a cancelled plan. Option B uses the present "are going to", which describes a current plan, not a past one being reported after the fact. Option C uses plain future "will", which does not carry the past-intention meaning needed here. Option D uses an unnecessary and unnatural future perfect infinitive combination that does not fit this context.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence that correctly uses "would" for a prediction made in the past, from a narrative viewpoint.
"The team believed the new cache layer would reduce latency by half" is correct: "would" is the backshifted form of "will" used to report a past belief about a future outcome, standard for future-in-the-past predictions in reported narrative. Option B keeps "will" unshifted, which is inconsistent with the past reporting verb "believed" in formal narrative style. Option C uses present simple, losing the predictive, future-oriented meaning entirely. Option D uses present tense "is going to", which is not correctly backshifted to match the past reporting context.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses future-in-the-past to describe an intention held before an incident occurred?
"The on-call engineer was going to escalate the ticket, but the pager notification never arrived" is correct: "was going to" expresses a past intention that was ultimately prevented, exactly the meaning needed to explain why the escalation did not happen. Option B uses the present "is going to", which does not fit a past narrative about an incident already resolved. Option C uses plain future "will", losing the past-intention framing. Option D incorrectly combines "had" with "going to", which is not a valid English verb form.
4 / 5
Select the sentence that correctly reports a past plan using "would" in an internal retrospective document.
"Management announced that the migration would be completed by Q3, though it later slipped to Q4" is correct: "would" backshifts the original "will" in the announcement to fit the past reporting verb "announced", correctly framing a plan later revised. Option B fails to backshift "will", inconsistent with the past-tense reporting frame. Option C uses present tense "is completed", which loses the future, planned nature of the statement and reads as already accomplished. Option D incorrectly combines "would" with the gerund "being" instead of the required base form "be", producing an ungrammatical passive.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "was going to" to describe an abandoned technical decision in a design retrospective?
"We were going to use a message queue for this workflow, but we chose synchronous calls instead for simplicity" is correct: "were going to + base verb" describes the original, later-abandoned plan, and "but" introduces the contrasting actual decision. Option B uses the present "are going to", inconsistent with describing a past, now-abandoned plan in a retrospective. Option C incorrectly follows "going to" with the gerund "using" instead of the base form "use". Option D drops the required "-ing" from "going", producing an ungrammatical verb form.