General English
What the section tests
General English tests functional grammar and comprehension rather than literary history. Recurring areas are subject–verb agreement, tenses, articles, prepositions, active/passive, direct/indirect speech, error spotting, sentence improvement, synonyms, antonyms, idioms and a reading passage.
Core rules
- A verb agrees with its subject, not with a noun in a prepositional phrase: The list of items is long.
- With one of + plural noun, the verb is singular: One of the boys was absent.
- Neither … nor and either … or take a verb agreeing with the nearer subject.
- In reported speech, shift tense back one step unless the reporting verb is present or the statement is a universal truth.
- For error spotting, check the underlined segment against the whole sentence, not in isolation.
Worked example
One of the students have submitted the assignment. The subject is one, singular; of the students is a modifier. Therefore the verb must be has: One of the students has submitted the assignment. The trap is proximity: students sits next to the verb but is not the subject.
Traps
- Treating news, mathematics, furniture as plurals.
- Missing a dangling modifier: Walking down the road, the tree was seen is wrong because the tree was not walking.
- Using less with countable nouns instead of fewer.
- Choosing an idiom’s literal meaning instead of its established sense.