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The shop wouldn't give me a refund even though my mobile is obviously broken.

Would it be better to match the tenses and to write "was broken" because the event (the broken watch) was also in the past as the refund and may be before it.

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It is optional, and could depend on whether the focus of your conversation is the "trip to the shop" or "the state of the phone". So if you are standing with the (broken) phone in your hand and talking about it, (so the trip to the shop is a small detail) you'd probably use "is". But if you are talking about how your day was wasted (so the fact that the phone is broken is part of the setting) you might use "was".

Of course if you'd repaired your phone (or it had "magically" repaired itself) then you would use "was".

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