English Language
What is tested
The English paper covers error spotting, sentence improvement, fill in the blanks (single and cloze), synonyms and antonyms, idioms, one-word substitution, spellings and a comprehension passage. The grammar is standard competitive English: agreement, tense, articles, prepositions, degrees of comparison and parallelism.
Rules that appear most
- Subject–verb agreement follows the head noun, not the nearest noun: 'One of the boys is', 'The list of items is'.
- 'Since' takes a point of time, 'for' takes a duration.
- 'A' before consonant sounds, 'an' before vowel sounds - 'an hour', 'a university'.
- Comparatives take 'than', but senior, junior, prior, superior and inferior take 'to'.
- Correlatives stay parallel: 'not only … but also'.
- Fixed prepositions: depend on, comply with, prefer to, comprise (never 'comprise of').
Worked example
'Hardly had he reached the station when the train left.' The fixed pair is 'hardly … when', and 'had reached' is past perfect because the second action is in the simple past. Options that replace 'when' with 'than' or 'then' are the standard distractors.
Idioms and one-word substitution
Learn each as a whole unit with a sentence: 'a bolt from the blue' (a sudden shock), 'to bury the hatchet' (to make peace); 'one who talks too much' = loquacious, 'a place where bees are kept' = apiary.
Traps
- Options that are grammatical but change the meaning of the original sentence.
- Over-correcting a sentence that is already correct - 'no error' is a genuine option.
- In comprehension, picking an option that is true in general but not stated in the passage.
- Similar spellings: principal/principle, stationary/stationery.