Grammar and Vocabulary
Grammar and Vocabulary is tested through "Do as directed" items, fill-in-the-blanks and matching - small questions whose marks add up quickly. The recurring bank is predictable: tense and subject–verb agreement, articles and prepositions, modals, active/passive, direct/indirect speech, degrees of comparison, question tags, conditionals, phrasal verbs, idioms, one-word substitution, synonyms and antonyms.
Rules that decide marks
- Change only what is asked. In voice change keep the tense; in reported speech shift the tense back one step only when the reporting verb is past.
- Question tags: match auxiliary and polarity. I am takes aren't I?; Let's takes shall we?; nothing/nobody in the sentence makes the tag positive.
- Prepositions follow the word, not the sense: superior to, prefer X to Y, comprise takes no of, married to.
- One-word substitution and idiom answers keep the original part of speech.
Worked example
The teacher said to the students, "Why are you late today?" → The teacher asked the students why they were late that day. Reasoning: said to becomes asked because the quotation is a question; the interrogative word order is reversed to statement order (why they were late, never why were they late); the pronoun you shifts to they and today to that day; no that is inserted after a wh-question; the question mark is dropped.
Traps that cost marks
- Inserting that in reported wh-questions or omitting it in reported statements.
- Forming a passive from an intransitive verb ("was gone" for went).
- Writing most with a comparative or than after a superlative.
- Changing the tense while transforming to the passive.
- Choosing a phrasal verb by literal meaning rather than by the pair that fits the sentence.