Sentence Transformation, Reordering and Completion
This section asks you to rewrite a sentence without changing its meaning, to arrange scrambled words into a correct sentence, or to complete a short dialogue or sentence. Marks are lost for small slips: a missing verb, a wrong tense, or question word order inside an indirect question.
Rewriting rules
- Keep the same tense, number and person as the original.
- Learn the standard equivalences: "Tom is the tallest in his class" becomes "No other student in Tom's class is as tall as Tom"; "How old are you?" becomes "What is your age?"; "Please sit down" becomes "Would you mind sitting down?"
- Indirect questions use statement order and drop do/does/did: "Do you know where she lives?"
Reordering rules
- Find the verb and its object first, then place the subject before the verb.
- Keep fixed chunks together: preposition + noun, relative pronoun + its clause.
- The given first word is fixed; do not move it.
Worked example
Arrange: the / who / girl / is / tennis / playing / my sister. Answer: The girl who is playing tennis is my sister. Reasoning: who introduces a clause about a person and acts as its subject, so who is playing tennis sits directly after the girl. The main verb is comes after that whole clause. A common wrong answer drops the second is.
Traps that cost marks
- Losing the main verb while building the relative clause.
- Using question order after "Do you know ...".
- Changing the tense or adding words that were not in the word bank.
- Forgetting the capital letter and the full stop at the end.