Answer

Correct Answer : a ) Teacher said that Earth revolves around the Sun.

The given sentence is in Direct Speech. Let us first understand the difference between the two forms of speech:

• Direct Speech: the message of the speaker is conveyed or reported in his own actual words without any change.
• Indirect Speech: the message of the speaker is conveyed or reported in our own words.

When a sentence is converted from Direct to Indirect speech, some common rules are followed:

• All inverted commas or quotation marks are omitted, and the sentence ends with a full stop.
• The conjunction ‘that’ is added after the reporting verb.
• The pronoun ‘is’ changes from first person to third person.
• The verb and the adverb are changed to their respective past tense forms.

There are some exceptions to the universal truth sentences. The universal truth sentence is the sentence, which is a universal truth, an accepted fact, or habitual action.

For the universal facts, the common rules are as follows:

• The conjunction ‘that’ is added before the indirect statement to connect reported speech and reporting speech.
• The reported speech remains the same.
• In the universal fact or truth, the tenses may not change.

In the above sentence, the reporting verb “says” is converted to “said”; while the remaining words remain in the original tense as it is a universal fact as well as reporting verb is in present form.

The option that converts the given sentence correctly as per the above rules is option A. All the other options can, therefore, be eliminated.

Hence, (A) is the correct answer.

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