Hi Katherine, We only use "had lived" when we are using the past perfect tense. We use the past perfect tense for something that started in the past and continued up to a given time in the past. In order to use "had lived" your sentence would be as follows: We had LIVED in Glasgow for six years before we moved to Singapore." So everything happened in the past, but one action happened before the other, (1st) had lived (2nd) moved. Nothing in the sentence is about the present. I hope this helps. Sinead

I would say that the reason that they have used the simple past tense "lived," is that there is no connection between the two events (living in Glasgow and living in Singapore). We usually use the past perfect tense to describe the first of two events, both of which were in the past, but where one event is related to the other - often the event that is furthest back in time caused the event that was less far back in time. "We had decided to travel to Paris by car but, at the last minute, two more friends decided to join us and there wasn't room for all of us in the car, so we all had to fly instead." or "He had decided to give the award for physics to John, but had to change his decision when it was revealed that John had cheated."