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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/12343
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I have an obstacle writing articles that have consistent verb tenses. Generally, I've been told that if I start an article in the past tense, I should keep other verbs in the past tense. But as I read more articles, books. I get confused by the verb tenses used in those literatures. Take for example in the following article. I believe it started in the past tense (the 1st paragraph), yet the second paragraph switched to the present tense (it **sounds** like the...). In the third paragraph a mixed on the past and present tense are used (the word **gave** is in past tense yet **remain** is in the present tense). Why in this article and many other literatures I get the impression that the author was changing verb tenses?

> **REPRESSED** for decades, the anger burst like a summer storm. Rioting youths **flooded** city streets. The shaken regime granted hasty concessions: freer speech; an end to one-party rule; real elections. But when Islamists **surged** towards victory in the first free elections the army stepped in, provoking a bloody struggle that lasted until the people, exhausted, acquiesced to a government similar in outlook, repression and even personnel to that which they had revolted against in the first place.
> 
> It **sounds** like the recent history of several Arab countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, the states of the 2011 Arab spring, have seen some or all of the story unfold. But this is also, and originally, Algeria, a quarter of a century earlier—the first major political crisis in the age of modern Islamism.
> 
> A flurry of freedom in the late 1980s **gave** way to a vicious civil war in the 1990s that left as many as 200,000 dead and Algeria’s Islamists more or less defeated, but not eradicated. Today the country’s citizens **remain** powerless spectators to a continued stand-off between what they call le pouvoir—the entrenched oligarchy that controls the state, the oil money and the army—and the now-marginalised Islamist radicals, who serve more as a justification for ongoing repression than as any sort of inspiration to ordinary people.

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