Use of English: Grammar and Vocabulary
Use of English: Grammar and Vocabulary tests control at sentence level - tense and aspect, modality, clause structure, and the collocational behaviour of words. Questions are typically gap-fill, multiple-choice cloze, and key-word transformation, where the mark depends on both structural accuracy and meaning preservation.
Structures that recur
- Inversion after negative or restrictive adverbials: No sooner had he spoken than ...; Not only did she resign, but ...; Rarely have I seen ...
- Conditionals: third conditional inversion Had I known ...; Were it not for ...; mixed If she had trained, she would be competing now.
- Subjunctive: insist/suggest/demand/recommend + that + base form (They insisted that he be told), and It is essential that ...
- Participle clauses: the understood subject must match the main clause subject - Having finished the report, she left (not Having finished, the office was empty).
- Relative clauses: whose for possession; of which/of whom after quantifiers; no comma with defining clauses.
- Word formation: affixes plus spelling shifts (maintain → maintenance, pronounce → pronunciation, succeed → success).
- Dependent prepositions and collocation: depend on, insistence on, a strong possibility, heavy rain, make a decision.
Worked example
Key word: HAD Her intervention was the only reason the deal survived. ______, the deal would not have survived.
Answer: Had she not intervened. Reasoning: the original asserts a counterfactual cause. English marks this with a third conditional; inversion replaces if, giving Had + subject + past participle. The negative is required because her intervention prevented failure. Had it not been for her intervention would also work, but Had she not intervened keeps the verb active and fits the frame.
Traps
- Writing Had she not have intervened - after had use the past participle, not have.
- Using despite with a clause; it takes a noun or gerund.
- Putting stative verbs in the continuous (I am knowing).
- Confusing used to (past habit), be used to (accustomed), and used for.
- Uncountable nouns treated as countable: advice, information, research, evidence.
- False friends: actual (real, not current), eventual (final, not possible).
- Losing marks on spelling in word formation even when the form is right.