General English: Grammar and Usage
Focus areas
General English rewards accuracy in subject-verb agreement, tenses, prepositions, articles, voice and narration, synonyms and antonyms, idioms, and spotting errors. Also practise comprehension and sentence rearrangement.
Traps to expect
- Collective nouns take a singular verb when acting as one unit.
- 'Each', 'every' and 'either' take singular verbs.
- Do not split infinitives unnecessarily, and watch misplaced modifiers.
- In idioms, meaning is fixed: 'to bite the bullet' means to endure pain, not to eat.
Worked example
Choose the correct sentence: 'One of my friends is coming.' The subject is 'one', not 'friends', so the verb is singular.
Rule of thumb
For error-spotting, read the sentence checking subject-verb pair, tense consistency, preposition collocation, and article use in that order. For vocabulary, learn words in pairs (synonym-antonym) with one example sentence each rather than isolated lists.