General English
General English tests grammar accuracy and everyday vocabulary rather than literary criticism. Expect error spotting, sentence correction, fill in the blanks with prepositions and articles, synonyms and antonyms, idioms, one-word substitution, and a short comprehension passage.
Core rules
- Subject-verb agreement: the verb agrees with the subject, not with a phrase in between - 'One of the boys is...', 'The list of items is...'.
- Neither/nor and either/or: the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
- Articles: 'a' before consonant sounds, 'an' before vowel sounds - 'an hour', 'a university', 'a one-rupee coin'.
- Fixed prepositions: depend on, consist of, comply with, prefer to, capable of.
- Tenses: present perfect for a past action with present relevance ('has gone'); past perfect for the earlier of two past actions.
Worked example
'Neither the teacher nor the students ___ present.' The conjunction is 'neither...nor', so the verb follows the nearer subject, 'students' (plural), giving 'were'. Reverse the order - 'Neither the students nor the teacher was present' - and the singular verb is correct. In vocabulary, use elimination: 'benevolent' means kind, so its antonym is 'malevolent', not 'generous'.
Traps that cost marks
- Collective nouns take a singular verb when acting as one unit - 'The committee has decided'.
- 'Since' takes a point in time, 'for' takes a duration.
- Idioms cannot be decoded literally - 'to bite the bullet' means to endure something painful.
- In comprehension, answer from the passage, not from general knowledge.
- 'Hardly' and 'scarcely' are followed by 'when', not 'than'.