The correct answers are had to and had to.
The modal verb "must" does not have a past tense form. To talk about an obligation or necessity in the past, we always use had to.
Modal verb
If you've ever struggled with the difference between You must do this (strong command) and You should do this (advice) — or It might rain (possible) and It will rain (certain) — you've felt how much modal verbs do in English. They're how the language signals certainty, obligation, possibility, and politeness, and getting them right is what stops your speech from sounding either pushy or wishy-washy.
A modal verb is an auxiliary — can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would — adding meaning around ability, permission, possibility, obligation, or speculation. Always followed by the bare infinitive (can swim, never can to swim), and never inflected for person.
Past tense
If you've ever told a story in English and felt the timeline get tangled — I came home, the dog ate, the cat slept — you've hit the limits of using simple past for everything. The past tense system has four forms specifically because real stories have layered timing: things that happened before other things, actions caught in progress, sequences of completed events.
The past tense has four English forms: simple past (I walked), past progressive (I was walking), past perfect (I had walked — earlier than another past event), past perfect progressive (I had been walking — ongoing up to a past point). Plus irregular verbs for the simple-past form.
English Grammar Basics
If grammar feels like a tangle of rules you can never quite remember, the fix isn't more advanced material — it's making the foundations automatic. The English Grammar Basics tag is where you do that: the building blocks every other topic stands on. Get these right and the rest stops feeling random.
It marks quizzes and explainers covering the core of English: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, tenses, voice, mood, and basic sentence structure. Useful whether you're a beginner or refreshing rusty knowledge.
Humor
If you've ever reached the third drill of present perfect and felt your eyes glaze over, you've hit the limits of dry repetition. Practice that's even mildly funny is far easier to come back to — and far easier to remember weeks later. That's the whole point of the Humor tag.
The Humor tag marks questions where the author has tried to make the practice entertaining alongside instructive. Subjective, sometimes silly, but designed to keep you engaged long enough for the rule to stick.
A2 | Elementary | Pre-intermediate
If you can order coffee, ask for directions, and tell someone what you did yesterday — but struggle the moment the conversation drifts into anything abstract — you're operating at A2. Knowing this matters: A2 is the level where most learners plateau because they reach for B2 material too early and burn out. Stay here and your foundations get unbreakable.
A2 is the elementary level in the CEFR framework, covering routine communication and the first wave of real grammar: past simple and continuous, present perfect, basic modal verbs, first conditional, and common verb-pattern rules.
Difficulty: Easy
If a textbook leaves you confused, sometimes the issue isn't the topic — it's that the practice material is layered with extra complications. Filtering by Easy strips that away. You get one rule at a time, in plain everyday language, with no trick questions. It's how you make a shaky foundation solid before stacking more on top.
The Easy difficulty tag marks beginner-level questions and challenges — typically A1 or early A2. Single-rule focus, short sentences, common vocabulary, one clear correct answer.