English Language: Grammar Rules That Repeat
What the section tests
English Language tests standard written English: reading comprehension, cloze test, error spotting, sentence improvement, fillers, para jumbles and vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms, idioms). Passages often deal with banking, financial inclusion or social themes, so words such as collateral, remittance and subsidy recur.
Core rules
- Subject-verb agreement: 'one of + plural noun' takes a singular verb (One of the clerks is...); 'a number of' takes a plural verb, 'the number of' a singular verb.
- Collective nouns (committee, jury, team) take a singular verb when acting as one unit.
- Prepositions: comprise takes no 'of'; discuss takes no 'about'; we say married to and composed of.
- Tenses: after 'since' or 'for', use present perfect (has worked here since 2019), not present simple.
- Para jumbles: locate the opening sentence (no unexplained pronoun), then follow pronoun and connector chains.
Worked example
Spot the error: 'One of my friend is working in the cooperative bank since three years.' Two faults. After 'one of', the noun must be plural: friends. And 'since' needs a point in time, so 'since three years' becomes 'for three years'. The verb also shifts to present perfect continuous for an action continuing to now. Correct: 'One of my friends has been working in the cooperative bank for three years.'
Traps that cost marks
Picking an option because it sounds right in speech; assuming a sentence needs a second error when it has only one; answering comprehension questions from general knowledge instead of the passage; and confusing affect/effect, principal/principle and complement/compliment, all of which appear in this paper.