French language Q&A Forum

I thought it was "de grosses douleur" - singular - and can't think of any way of being able to hear whether it was singular or plurial. Does it have to be plural because the gums are plural? In English we could say "pain in my gums", but in French perhaps it's necessary to say "pains in my gums"? Or would "ce qui me causauit de grosse douleur dans les gencives" still be correct?

[By the way - there's a typo in the full text - "genvices" for "gencives"...]

I was asked to fill in the blank for the sentence, "After he said that, he left," where the conjugation of dire was missing. I had been asked so much lately about passé simple that I used simply dit, when a dit was expected. I was marked wrong for that.

But isn't it also correct, although unexpected? Or is it just that a native speaker would never do that for such a simple sentence, so it should be discouraged?

Why is "I had to read a poem" given the imperfect here? The lesson flagged under the answer (Using "devoir" in the imperfect tense versus the compound past in French (L'Imparfait vs Le Passé Composé)) suggests it should be passé composé, since it refers to an obligation that was completed.