Indirect Questions

When you want information you can ask questions directly: Is he playing the piano?Where is Tom?

For these questions we use the inverted word order:

(auxiliary) verb + subject + (main verb)

Sometimes, however, we prefer to start our questions with “Do you know…” or “Could you

tell me…?”

Questions that begin like that are called indirect questions and they have a different word order:

Is he playing the piano?

Do you know if he is playing the piano?

Where is Tom?

Do you know where Tom is?

Did you notice that we don’t invert the subject and the verb in the indirect questions?

The word order is the same as the statement word order.

This is because indirect questions are questions inside questions:

Look:

[Do you know] [where Tom is?]

Question 1 is a regular questionQuestion 2 is an indirect question inside

question 1.

question 1 question 2

Here are some more examples. Notice the highlighted indirect questions:

Can you tell me how much it is?Do you know if Helen can work tomorrow?Could you tell me what time the train leaves?Do you remember if Jim brought the documents?