The simple past tense: 1) Describes actions and states that began and ended in the past. Regular verbs form the past tense by adding "-ed" and irregular verbs have their own unique past tense forms. 2) Questions in the past tense are formed using "did" plus the subject and base form of the verb. Short answers use "yes/no" plus the subject pronoun and "did/didn't." 3) Common time phrases used with the past tense include yesterday, last night, in 1980, and other specific times or durations in the past.