English Language and Grammar: Usage Over Labels
Core areas
English questions usually test grammar in use rather than label memorisation. Revise parts of speech, subject–verb agreement, tense and aspect, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, active/passive voice, direct/indirect speech, degrees of comparison, conditionals, and modifiers. For vocabulary, practise synonyms, antonyms, idioms, one-word substitutions, spellings, and cloze tests. For composition, practise error spotting, sentence improvement, para jumbles and short comprehension.
Traps
Agreement traps are everywhere: 'one of + plural noun' takes a singular verb; 'each/every/either/neither' is singular; collective nouns are singular when acting as one unit. Watch 'since' (point of time) vs 'for' (duration), 'affect' (verb) vs 'effect' (noun), and 'lie/lay'. Dangling modifiers and faulty parallelism are common in sentence-improvement items. In narration, do not change the tense if the reporting verb is present and the statement is universal.
Rule of thumb
For error spotting, read the sentence without the underlined part and ask: who is the subject, what is the finite verb, and do they agree? Then check prepositions and articles, which rarely change meaning but often carry the error.
Worked example
'One of my friends ___ a doctor.' Options: is, are, were, have. The head of the subject is 'one', which is singular; 'of my friends' is a prepositional phrase. Correct: is. If the sentence were 'He is one of those who ___ hard', the relative pronoun 'who' refers to 'those' and takes 'work'.