Hello!
This video is about "by" and "past". The difference between be "by the house" and "go past the
house". Also the difference between "the past", the noun and the verb "to pass" and the past
tense,"passed". Hope you find it useful!
We're looking at "by" and "past", the prepositions first of all, and here's a picture; draw a
house and a front door and a little walk way, and we'll put in a tree, a nice green tree
and some grass, and a tent, next to the tree. In front of the house we'll put a road with
a path.
Now I can write up here "The tree is by the house", next to the house if you like, and
"The tent is by the tree", the tent is by the tree - They're not moving, that's where
they are, that is their position, their place.
Now look at these people, here is a young woman on her bicycle scooting along and behind
her comes a young man, moving rather more slowly and they are going past the house and
the tree, and the tent aswell. So I'll just write underneath here "she is cycling, she
is cycling past the house" and "he is walking past the house".
So "by" is for talking about place and "past" is for talking about movement. But, it's a
bit more complicated than that. I'm just going to draw a box here, this is me drawing by
the way not Caroline you can tell right away. A box, and next to the box I'll put a ball,
there's a little red ball. Now we can say that the red ball is "by" the box, so I'll
just write there "by the box", that's it. Now let's have another ball. We'll put a blue
ball over here and I'll move the blue ball along, putting in speed marks to show that
it's moving and there, for course, it will be "past the box" exactly the same as over
there on the left.
But you can also say "the ball is going by the box" and that's rather important that
you can use "by" for both but "past" for only one. Now I'll just write them again here "by"
and "past". I'm going to draw a line here, if I can, straight as I can, there we go,
oops! And I'll just write "place" there and I'll draw another line here next to "past".
"Past the box" that's it, another line and I'll write here "movement" because "by" is
for place and "past" is for movement. But I'm going to add another line because "by"
is also used for movement. It's a little bit like the switch on a railway line and I call
this "The Switch".
"The Switch" is when you get two similar items which do two different jobs - One of them
does one of the jobs and the other one does both of the jobs. It's very common in English
and there are hundreds, maybe thousands or examples. Now you may be thinking "Hang on,
if this is true then how about those sentences on the left? Can we not say she is cycling
by the house?". And the answer is yes, we can so I'll just write in "by" and "by".
There we go, "she is cycling by the house" or "he is walking by the house", we can use
by or past.
Now, next thing, we've also got "the past" as a noun - the past, the present, the future.
And we have past as a verb - the verb "to pass" and the past tense of pass is "passed".
Oh sorry, it's a bit confusing because it sounds the same! So we could have another
sentence over here which I'll now write in "they passed the house", they passed the house.
So, we've got several things to think about; we've got "by" for place, but also for movement,
we've got "past" for movement and we have the noun "the past" and we have the past tense
of the verb "pass" which is also "passed" (different spelling).
Now to see if you've understood all that, and it's quite complicated, I'm going to rub
all this out and start a little test.