General English
What is tested
Grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, sentence correction, synonyms and antonyms, idioms, one-word substitutions, spelling and fill-in-the-blanks, usually at a moderate competitive level.
Rules that recur
- Subject-verb agreement: 'The number of applicants is large' but 'A number of applicants are waiting'; 'One of the boys was'.
- Articles: 'an' before a vowel sound (an hour, an MLA), 'a' before a consonant sound (a university, a European).
- Fixed prepositions: abide by, consist of, comply with, deprive of, prefer to, superior to.
- Conditionals and reported speech: 'If I were you', 'He said that he had finished'.
- Parallelism with 'not only ... but also' and 'either ... or'.
- Confusable pairs: affect and effect, principal and principle, complement and compliment, stationary and stationery.
Worked example
'Neither the sarpanch nor the panchs ___ present.' Reasoning: with 'neither ... nor', the verb agrees with the nearer subject, here the plural 'panchs', so 'were' is correct; 'was' would apply if the order were reversed.
Vocabulary building
Do not memorise isolated word lists. Learn each word inside a sentence and note its part of speech, because the paper often tests a different form of the word you studied.
Comprehension method
Read the questions first, then the passage, and answer only from what the passage states. An option that is generally true but absent from the passage is wrong.
Traps
- Choosing an option because it sounds natural rather than matching the grammatical subject.
- Taking idioms literally: 'to bite the dust' means to fail, not to eat dirt.
- Overlooking the singular 'one of the' construction, which takes a singular verb.