Did you buy that car you were looking at What tense is this?

Answer 1

In the sentence, "Did you buy that car you were looking at?", the verb is the two word phrase "did ... buy". This is technically the "intensive past" tense of "buy", but it could more reasonably be called the "interrogative past" tense, since it is used more often to ask questions than to show intensity of feeling. If the tense was used to show intensity, the two words in it would usually be consecutive, rather than divided as in the sentence shown. An example of this would be "He did buy that car, despite all its problems about which I warned him."