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¿El adolescente rebelde sufría en la escuela?

¿El adolescente rebelde sufría en la escuela?
Did the rebellious teenager suffer at school?
From Lesson 110:Imperfect of regular -er and -ir verbs (-ía)·Spanish (Latin America)

Questions & Answers about ¿El adolescente rebelde sufría en la escuela?

Why do we use the imperfect sufría here instead of the preterite sufrió?
The imperfect tense is used to describe ongoing, continuous, or habitual situations in the past. Here, the sentence is asking if the teenager suffered generally over a period of time during school, rather than a single, completed event.
Why does sufría have an accent mark on the letter i?
For regular -er and -ir verbs in the imperfect tense, every single form has an accent mark on the í (like sufría, sufríamos, sufrían). This tells you to put the stress on the i and prevents it from blending into the a as a single syllable.
Both adolescente and rebelde end in the letter e. How do we know this is about a male teenager?
The noun adolescente can refer to a male or female teenager, and the adjective rebelde keeps the same form for both genders. To know if it is a boy or a girl, you have to look at the article. The masculine el tells us it is a boy. If it were a girl, it would be la adolescente rebelde.
English uses the word 'did' to make this a past-tense question. Why is there no translation for 'did' in the Spanish sentence?
Spanish does not use helper words like 'do' or 'did' to form questions. Instead, you just use the past tense verb (in this case, sufría) and frame the sentence with question marks.

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