Peter Whittle
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I would not accept "It took me lots of time
preparing". It takes time to do something, not doing something. You can say
"I spent a lot of time preparing", but it is not correct usage (in the UK at
least) to take time doing X. It should be take + time + infinitive or spend +
time + gerund. There's also a good case to be made for arguing that only the
present continuous tense is appropriate for the second of the questions,
since if the past continuous tense ("was looking") is used, it can be taken
to imply that he is no longer looking, and therefore there's no point in
approaching him about getting the job. However, I would accept that "was
looking" is just about passable, since it suggests the speaker knew he was
looking, and maybe hasn't yet found anyone, so it might still be worth
approaching him about it. As for the third question (18), I strongly disagree
that "it" is acceptable. The subject is "buses", plural, so cannot be
referred to by the singular pronoun "it". Only "one" (one of the buses) is
appropriate here. If the sentence had been written as "The bus only comes" or
"There is a bus (singular) every hour", then "it" would be correct, but
that's not how the sentence in the cloze test is written.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011764962687