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Pete wasn't studying very hard when he was at university [1].

The instruction of the question on the exercise I was doing is determining which one sentence is incorrect. The key answer says the sentence above is incorrect, but it doesn't explain why.

Don't we use past progressive for repeated actions around a particular time? For instance, the example I took from Oxford Grammar:

I was playing a lot of tennis when I got to know Peter [2].

The particular time of [1] is when Pete was at university and [2] is when the speaker got to know Peter. We don't know how long the speaker had got to know Peter in [2], as well as we don't know how long he had studied at university in [1]. Then why is the sentence [1] incorrect?

user516076
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    I don't see anything really wrong with the sentence, but I suspect that (as "when Pete was at university" is a defined time period, that is, a time of non-zero and non-infinite length) they were looking for "Pete didn't study very hard." – randomhead Nov 14 '21 at 03:53
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    I agree with randomhead. Also, "wasn't studying very hard" seems to require "while he was at university", which would make his time there sound like a brief episode in a long life of studying. – Old Brixtonian Nov 14 '21 at 04:54
  • Nothing wrong with the sentence. No native English speaker will bat an eyelid if you say this. – gnasher729 Nov 14 '21 at 16:31
  • The book is called Oxford English Grammar (https://www.amazon.ca/Oxford-English-Grammar-Sidney-Greenbaum/dp/0198612508). – Nike Dattani Dec 28 '21 at 06:24

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I agree with all three of the comments, which agree unanimously that:

"Pete wasn't studying very hard when he was at university"

is grammatically acceptable. You have assumed that the problem had something to do with the "past progressive for repeated actions", and without seeing the actual exercise set from which this example came, I can't be completely sure what their qualm with this sentence was, but I will point out that "at university" vs "in university" is indeed a word choice matter that gets asked often. However, as you will find if you follow the links given in the above link, the phrase "at university" seems to be used far more often than "in university", so the authors of the exercise set have likely just chosen something that doesn't agree with the majority of native English speakers.

Nike Dattani
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