Grammar and Language Usage
The recurring items
This section recycles a fixed set of items: articles, prepositions, verb forms and tenses, subject–verb agreement, active and passive voice, reported speech, degrees of comparison, if-clauses, question tags, sentence patterns, linkers and error correction. Marks are lost through small slips, not through ignorance, so practise the rules as decisions, not as guesses.
Rules that carry marks
- Agreement follows the true subject. In 'One of the boys ___', the subject is 'one', so the verb is singular.
- With 'neither...nor' and 'either...or', the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
- Reported speech shifts the tense back one step after a past reporting verb, unless the statement is a universal truth.
- In the passive, the object becomes the subject and the tense of 'be' must match the original tense.
- Conditionals: Type 1 uses 'if + present, will'; Type 2 uses 'if + past, would'; Type 3 uses 'if + had + past participle, would have'.
- Question tags reverse the polarity of the statement and repeat its auxiliary.
Worked example
Task: rewrite in reported speech - She said, "I am reading the notice now." Reasoning: the reporting verb 'said' is past, so present continuous 'am reading' becomes past continuous 'was reading'; 'now' becomes 'then'; the pronoun 'I' becomes 'she'. Answer: "She said that she was reading the notice then."
Traps that cost marks
- Pluralising uncountable nouns ('informations', 'advices').
- Forgetting the tense backshift after a past reporting verb.
- Putting 'would' inside the if-clause of a Type 2 conditional.
- Using 'amn't I?' instead of 'aren't I?'.
- Treating 'hardly', 'never' and 'seldom' as positive when forming tags.