He said, "The mice will play, when the cat is away."

Solution (By Examveda Team)

This question tests your understanding of Reported Speech and how to correctly transform a sentence containing a future tense verb and a conditional clause.

Reported Speech refers to conveying what someone said without quoting their exact words. When converting direct speech into indirect speech, we follow specific rules regarding tense changes, pronoun changes, and time or condition adjustments.

Original Sentence (Direct Speech): He said, "The mice will play, when the cat is away."

Step-by-step Analysis:
The reporting verb is in the past tense: "said".
The verb in the main clause is "will play" — this is simple future tense.
In reported speech, "will" usually changes to "would".
The clause "when the cat is away" is a time clause.
In reported speech, if the main reporting verb is in the past tense, verbs in the subordinate clause also usually change accordingly — so "is" becomes "was".

Correct transformation:
He said that the mice would play when the cat was away.

Correct Answer: Option B: He said that the mice would play when the cat was away.

Other Options:
Option A: He said that the mice will play when the cat is away. — ❌ Incorrect. No tense change applied; "will" and "is" should be changed to "would" and "was" respectively.
Option C: He said that the mice would play when the cat would be away. — ❌ Incorrect. In time/conditional clauses introduced by "when", "if", etc., we do not use "would". Instead, we use the simple past "was".
Option D: He said that the mice shall play, when the cat is away. — ❌ Incorrect. "Shall" is not used here, and tense changes have not been correctly applied.

Conclusion: The sentence is best and most correctly reported in Option B, which maintains the necessary tense changes and grammatical structure.