Past Perfect Simple or Past Perfect Continuous? - Part 8

Choose the past perfect simple or the past perfect continuous

I ..... my homework by the time my friends arrived.

had been finishing

had finished

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Rule: Past Perfect Continuous – B1 Grammar ShowHide

had been + -ing

An activity that went on for some time up to a moment in the past.

How long – with for, since, all day: Pam had been doing the same job for ten years before she tried something different.
The cause of a past result: Driving to work was difficult as it had been snowing all night.

I hadn't been sleeping well.
His clothes were covered in mud. What had he been doing?

Past Perfect Simple instead

had + 3rd form – the focus is on a finished action or its result.

How many, how much: I had looked at twenty flats before I found one I liked.
Done before another moment: I had finished my homework by the time my friends arrived.
Something that didn't happen: We were hungry because we hadn't eaten since breakfast.
State verbs – know, like, have (own): We had known each other for years.

Ask yourself: is it about the duration, how long it was going on? Take the continuous: They had been filming the same scene for three hours. Is it about the result, what was done or how many times? Take the simple: The phone had rung six times before they answered it.

Two books or four hours?

The rule is short: if the sentence counts a result – two books, fifteen matches, three emails – English uses the past perfect simple. If it measures the time an action ran for, or explains a state that came out of it, the continuous takes over.

Eleven sentences, one picture each. Level B1.