English
What the paper tests
The English section checks functional grammar and comprehension rather than literary criticism. Expect error spotting, sentence correction, fill-in-the-blanks with prepositions and articles, synonyms and antonyms, one-word substitutions, idioms and phrases, para jumbles, reading comprehension, and occasionally technical or maritime vocabulary used in ships' documents and notices to mariners.
Core rules to have at your fingertips
- Subject–verb agreement: the verb agrees with the head noun, not with an intervening phrase. "The list of spare parts is long."
- "One of + plural noun" takes a singular verb: "One of the lifeboats has been damaged."
- Collective nouns (crew, team, jury) take a singular verb when acting as a unit, plural when members act individually.
- "The number of" is singular; "a number of" is plural.
- Reported speech: shift tense back one step and adjust time and place words.
- Prepositions after verbs: comprise (no 'of'), consist of, depend on, comply with, superior to.
Worked example
Spot the error: "Each of the cadets were asked to produce their identity card." The subject is "each", which is singular; "of the cadets" is a prepositional phrase and does not change the number. The verb must therefore be "was", not "were". The possessive should also agree in a formal register: "his or her identity card". Corrected: "Each of the cadets was asked to produce his or her identity card."
Traps that cost marks
- Being misled by a plural noun sitting between the subject and the verb.
- Confusable pairs: affect/effect, principal/principle, stationary/stationery, complement/compliment.
- Dangling modifiers, where the opening participle describes the wrong noun.
- Treating "hardly", "scarcely" and "barely" as negatives that need a second negative.
- In para jumbles, fixing the opening sentence by tone instead of by pronoun and connector chains.