La lectura
Read the following passage and then answer the questions that follow. After you have answered the questions, click on the question to see the answer to each question. Again, when you see words that you do not know yet, first try to guess at their meaning.
Yo me llamo Miguel Domínguez. Vivo en Quito. Me gusta vivir en Quito porque es una ciudad muy grande. Me gusta estudiar en la clase de inglés porque me gusta hablar inglés. Escribo y escucho mucho en la clase de inglés. Los sábados, no estudio en la clase porque no hay clases. Los sábados me gusta pasear en el parque y comer con mis amigos en un café. Estoy muy bien en el parque. El Parque Carolina es un parque en Quito. Me gusta correr en los parques de Quito.
The words in bold in the question are called interrogatives, or question words. They are words that we use to ask questions to get information--who?, when?, why?, where?, how?, what? Some of them you already know from previous lessons. ¿Dónde? and ¿cómo? are not new to you. There are, however, other question words that you have not officially learned. Try your hand at guessing their meanings. Click on the question word to see if you have accurately guessed its meaning.
| ¿Quién? | |
| ¿Cómo? | |
| ¿Cuándo? | |
| ¿Dónde? | |
| ¿Por qué? | |
| ¿Qué? |
Asking "yes/no" Questions
In order to ask questions that simply ask for a yes/no answer in Spanish, we simply reverse the word order, as we have talked about before:
¿Estudia Pedro mucho? |
| Sí, Pedro estudia mucho. Or No, Pedro no estudia mucho. |
However, if we want to ask a question to get information (who, when, where, why, how, etc.) we have an additional step. We insert the question word we are asking, then reverse the order of the subject and verb.
| ¿Dónde estudia Pedro? |
| Pedro estudia en la biblioteca. |
So the question words will come at the beginning and the rest of the sentence keeps the typical question word order.
