Cuando yo (1) [era] (ser) pequeña, me (2) [gustaba] (gustar) mucho ir de compras con mis padres. Ellos siempre me (3) [compraban] (comprar) lo que yo (4) [quería] (querer). Un día, nosotros (5) [fuimos] (ir) al centro comercial donde yo (6) [vi] (ver) un abrigo muy bonito. (7) [Era] (ser) muy caro, pero se lo (8) [pedí] (pedir) a mis padres. Ellos me (9) [dijeron] (decir) que no, por ser tan caro. Ese día yo (10) [aprendí] (aprender) una lección: uno no siempre recibe lo que quiere.

1. Imp: The focus is on during the time when she was little. There is no clearly marked beginning and end.
2. Imp: This was something that she liked to do regularly.
3. Imp: Most of the time, the imperfect will be used if it is accompanied by the word "siempre." They regularly bought for her.
4. Imp: "...what I wanted." Otherwise, "querer" in the preterite means "to try." (See the second part of section 8.2 on the course website.)
5. Pret: The key phrase is "un día." The tone changes from what usually happened to what happened on one particular day.
6. Pret: She saw the coat once. It might be in imperfect if she was looking at the coat and something interrupted her, but all it states is a simple past that she saw the coat.
7. Imp: This is like the fish example from exercise one. It is a background event / setting, and the price in a sense is the ongoing status of the coat.
8. Pret: She asked for it once. This was not a regularly occurring thing where she always asked for it many times. She only asked for it on this occasion.
9. Pret: occurs once
10. Pret: She only learned this lesson on that day; it was not something she learned over a period of time.