English: Grammar, Vocabulary and Comprehension
What the paper tests
English questions at this level fall into four groups: grammar and usage (tense, subject-verb agreement, articles, prepositions, conditionals), vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms, one-word substitution, idioms), sentence correction and transformation, and reading comprehension. Build accuracy in the first three through short daily drills, and practise comprehension by reading a passage once for gist, then again to locate the exact line that answers each question.
Concepts to master
Know the difference between countable and uncountable nouns for articles and quantifiers; know that subjects joined by and take a plural verb while each, every, either, neither take a singular verb; know reported speech backshift; know the correct preposition after common verbs (depend on, consist of, insist on, comply with). For vocabulary, learn words in families with a sentence for each, not as bare lists.
Traps
Questions often hide a singular subject inside a long phrase ("The list of names was long"), place a negative before a comparative ("no better than"), or use a double negative. In comprehension, the distractor repeats words from the passage but reverses the logic. Idiom questions punish literal reading.
Rule of thumb
For sentence correction, find the verb first and ask who or what performs it. If the performer and verb disagree in number, that is almost always the error. For comprehension, answer only from the passage, never from general knowledge.
Worked example
"Neither of the two proposals ___ acceptable." The subject is neither, singular, so the answer is is, not are.