Grammar and Vocabulary in Context: Completion, Reordering, and Error Finding
This section checks whether you can pick the right form for a specific sentence, not whether you can recite rules. Expect blank-filling with choices, word-form changes, sentence reordering with one word already placed, and choosing the incorrect or correct form.
Core rules
- Tense is decided by time signals: every day/usually (present), yesterday/last week/in 2019 (past), tomorrow/will (future), since/for/just/already/yet/ever/never (present perfect), while/when plus a past action (past progressive).
- Passive is be plus past participle, with by for the doer.
- Relative pronouns: a person takes who or that, a thing takes which or that, and what is used only when there is no noun in front of it.
- After want, hope, decide, and try, use to plus verb; after enjoy, finish, and stop, use the -ing form.
- Comparison: as tall as, taller than, the tallest, and one of the tallest plus a plural noun.
- Word-form items test suffixes and irregulars: rain to rainy, quick to quickly, child to children, teach to taught, buy to bought.
Worked example
"This is the camera ( ) my father bought in Osaka." Choices: who / which / what / whose. The noun in front is camera, a thing, so who and whose are out. What cannot follow a noun. Which fits, and it is the object of bought. Answer: which (that is also accepted). If the sentence had been "( ) my father bought in Osaka was expensive," with no noun in front, the answer would be What.
Traps
- Choosing what after a noun because it "sounds right."
- Dropping the third-person -s or the plural -s in a sentence that is otherwise perfect.
- Mixing tense inside one sentence: "When I was young, I go to the park."
- Using an adjective where an adverb is needed: "She sang happy" instead of happily.
- In reordering, placing the adverb before the verb when the verb is be ("She always is busy" should be "She is always busy").