English (Compulsory): Comprehension, Grammar and Writing
Structure of the skill set
English compulsory rewards accuracy under time pressure: unseen passage comprehension, gap-filling with clues, grammar transformation, sentence completion, summary writing, and guided composition (paragraph, letter/email, story or graph description).
Concepts to understand
- Tense and aspect consistency: simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous; keep the narrative tense stable unless the meaning demands a shift.
- Subject-verb agreement with collective nouns, indefinite pronouns, and "one of the + plural noun".
- Voice and narration: passive transformation keeps tense and aspect; reported speech shifts tense, pronouns and time markers together.
- Conditionals and modals: zero/first/second/third conditional patterns; modal + base verb.
- Cloze and summary technique: use syntactic clues (article, preposition, parallel structure) before meaning clues.
- Composition: topic sentence, two or three developed supporting ideas, concluding sentence; formal letter conventions.
Traps
- Changing tense mid-paragraph in a summary.
- Copying whole sentences from the passage into a summary instead of compressing.
- Forgetting to change time and place words in reported speech.
- Using a modal with "to" ("can to go").
- Writing a paragraph with no topic sentence, or a letter without salutation and closing.
- Ignoring word limits in summary and graph description.
Worked rule of thumb
For reported speech, change four things in order: reporting verb, tense, pronouns, time/place words. Example: He said, "I will come here tomorrow." → He said that he would go there the next day. Tense back-shifts (will → would), pronoun follows the reporter's viewpoint (I → he), and both "here" and "tomorrow" shift. Check all four before moving on.