Grammar - Tenses, Voice, Narration, Clauses, Determiners, Prepositions
The grammar block of the RBSE paper is usually 'do as directed': a set of sentences to be rewritten or completed. The tested areas are tense and subject–verb agreement, active and passive voice, direct and indirect narration, clause types and connectors, determiners, prepositions and modals.
Core rules
- Passive voice: object becomes subject, the verb becomes a form of be + past participle, and the doer is dropped or placed after 'by'. Keep the tense of the original.
- Narration: remove quotation marks, change 'said to' to 'told', backshift the tense one step (present → past, past → past perfect, will → would), and adjust pronouns, time and place words ('now' → 'then', 'tomorrow' → 'the next day', 'here' → 'there').
- Reported questions take statement word order and no question mark; report yes/no questions with 'if' or 'whether'.
- Clauses: a noun clause can replace a subject or object; a relative clause follows its noun and takes who/which/whose/where; an adverb clause of time, reason or condition links with when, because, if.
- Determiners: a/an by sound, 'the' for something specified or unique, some/any by polarity, much/many and little/few by countability.
- Prepositions: learn them in chunks ('insist on', 'complain about', 'since' with a point in time, 'for' with duration).
Worked example
'He said, "I am writing a letter now."' Answer: 'He said that he was writing a letter then.' Reasoning: 'said' stays; 'I' shifts to 'he'; present continuous backshifts to past continuous; 'now' becomes 'then'; the comma and quotation marks disappear.
Traps
Keeping quotation marks or question order; forgetting to backshift; using 'told' without an object; forming the passive of intransitive verbs such as 'sleep' or 'arrive'; choosing 'an' by spelling rather than sound; mixing 'since' and 'for'.