Grammar and Language Usage
What the grammar section tests
Grammar and Language Usage tests discrete accuracy and sentence control: tense consistency, subject–verb agreement, articles, prepositions, active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech, degrees of comparison, question tags, conditionals, and simple, compound and complex sentence transformation.
Core rules
- Find the real subject before choosing the verb. Phrases between subject and verb do not change agreement.
- With 'neither...nor' and 'either...or', the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
- Keep tense sequence in reported speech unless the statement is a permanent truth.
- In passive voice, the object of the active sentence becomes the subject; the tense of 'be' must match the original tense.
- For transformation, preserve meaning and change only the structure named in the instruction.
- In reported questions, use 'if/whether' for yes–no questions and statement order, not question order.
Worked example
Direct: He said, 'I am going to Mysuru tomorrow.' Reported: He said that he was going to Mysuru the next day. Reasoning: The reporting verb is past ('said'), so present continuous 'am going' backshifts to past continuous 'was going'. The pronoun 'I' changes to 'he', and 'tomorrow' becomes 'the next day'. If the reporting verb were 'says', the tense could remain present. The marks lie in all three changes, not only the verb.
Traps
Changing the verb but forgetting pronoun and time shifts; using 'was' with a plural subject because a singular noun sits nearby; confusing 'would' and 'will'; losing meaning in voice change; and rewriting a sentence when only one word is required.
Exam habit
After editing, read the sentence aloud without the phrase between subject and verb. Agreement errors become audible.