Grammar and Vocabulary
What is tested
Grammar and vocabulary appear as contextual items: reported speech, active and passive voice, conditional sentences, question tags, degrees of comparison, tenses, articles and prepositions, plus phrasal verbs, idioms, prefixes and suffixes, synonyms and antonyms, and editing.
Core rules
- Reported speech: shift the tense back one step (present to past, past to past perfect, will to would), change pronouns to the reporter's viewpoint, and change time and place words - now to then, today to that day, tomorrow to the next day, yesterday to the previous day, here to there, this to that. "Said" becomes "told" only when a listener is named.
- Reported questions: use if/whether for yes-no questions, keep statement word order, and drop the question mark.
- Passive: the object becomes subject, followed by the correct form of be plus past participle, with the tense unchanged. For imperatives, use "Let it be done."
- Conditionals: if + present, will (Type 1); if + past, would (Type 2); if + past perfect, would have + past participle (Type 3).
- Question tags: opposite polarity, matching auxiliary and subject; "I am" takes "aren't I".
- Vocabulary: learn phrasal verbs inside sentences (put off, give in, call off, look after, turn down) and build word families with prefixes (un-, in-, dis-, mis-) and suffixes (-ful, -less, -ness, -ment).
Worked example
Direct: She said, "Did you finish the project yesterday?" Reasoning: it is a yes-no question, so the reporting verb becomes asked and if is added. Past simple shifts to past perfect; "yesterday" becomes "the previous day"; "you" becomes "I" because I am the listener. Indirect: She asked me if I had finished the project the previous day.
Traps
Forgetting the time-word change; writing "told that" for questions; leaving the question mark in; pairing the wrong conditionals ("if I would have"); tags that repeat the same polarity; confusing look-alikes such as affect/effect and practice/practise.