English Language
English Language carries 30 questions in Phase 1 and a full 50-question section in Phase 2, and it rewards rule-based accuracy far more than raw reading speed. Reading comprehension - usually one economics/insurance passage and one social or governance passage - supplies roughly a third of the marks; the rest is split between spotting errors, sentence rearrangement, fillers, cloze, word usage, phrase replacement and match-the-column.
Core rules to memorise
- Subject-verb agreement: a phrase joined by of does not change the number of the head noun - The committee of experts has submitted; one of the insurers has.
- Parallelism: items in a list take the same grammatical form; mixed forms are the standard trap in phrase-replacement items.
- Rearrangement hinges on connectors (however, therefore, in fact), pronouns (this, they, which) and chronology. An opening sentence almost never begins with a pronoun or a contrast word.
- Match-the-column tests collocation, not just meaning: lodge a claim, underwrite a risk, settle a claim, pay a premium.
- Insurance-passage fillers test register: indemnify, liability, actuarial, solvency, underwriting.
Worked example
Spot the error: The insurer has received a large number of complaint about the delay in claim settlement. The decisive error is the singular complaint after the plural count quantifier a large number of, which requires complaints. The second weakness is stylistic - delay in settling claims reads better than delay in claim settlement, but only the first is a grammatical error. Without a stated error option, mark both.
Traps
Reading the entire passage before answering grammar and vocabulary items burns minutes; attempt direct-recall items first and read closely only for inference questions. Also, do not pick a synonym that is correct in isolation but wrong in the passage's context.