(Originais Teachy 2024) - Question Easy of English

Read the following excerpt from a short story: 'She was sitting by the window, gazing at the falling rain. It had been a long day, and she felt as if the weather outside perfectly mirrored her mood. A cup of hot tea was steaming on the table, but she had hardly touched it. Her mind was wandering, recalling the events of the day.' Consider the use of the past continuous tense in the passage to describe ongoing actions in the past. 1. How does the past continuous tense help to convey the sense of ongoing or incomplete actions at a specific point in the past in the given context? 2. Rewrite the underlined sentence in the passage using the simple past tense. Then, discuss how the meaning of the sentence changes when using the simple past tense instead of the past continuous tense.