So I had an exam recently where in one problem we had to complete sentences with verbs in either past simple or past continuous tense.
One of the sentences was something like this:
He _______ in France when she first met him. (live)
Most of us wrote "was living" there but our teacher said that the only correct answer is "lived" because this sentence states facts.
That was the only explanation she gave and she dismissed our argument that there's no context suggesting that we can't emphasize the first half of the sentence, but she said we can't do that, this sentence is clearly just stating facts, we just can't understand the difference between past simple and past continuous.
Now, to my knowledge and according to everything I read on the web, both can be correct, the difference is the emphasis and/or the exact meaning.
Am I missing something?
Best Answer
I have spoken English for 50 years and I can say authoritatively that the idiomatic way to express what appears to be the meaning, that he happened to be a resident of France at some particular time in the past, is
Imagine it were some other verb, "He was eating his lunch when..." "He was wearing a jacket when..."
The only reason to use simple past would be to imply some causal connection:
Even in those sentences, you could say "He was living."
"Living in France" is almost a phrasal adjective. Compare
Your teacher is mistaken. There is nothing about the continuous that depends on the factual nature of the sentence -- it is about aspectuality and causality.