Grammar and Usage
Grammar and usage on the UEE English exam tests sentence-level accuracy: tense and aspect, subject-verb agreement, articles and determiners, prepositions, clause structure, pronouns, conditionals, inversion, and parallelism. Questions often ask you to choose the form that fits the whole sentence, so read the entire sentence before deciding.
Core rules and concepts
- Identify the main subject and verb first; ignore interrupting phrases.
- Match tense to time markers and to the surrounding narrative or argument.
- Relative clauses need a subject or object gap: "the book that I bought" (object gap), "the book that sold out" (subject gap).
- Conditional patterns: "If + present, will"; "If + past, would"; "If + had + past participle, would have + past participle."
- Parallel structures require matching forms: "to plan, to draft, and to revise," not "to plan, drafting, and revision."
Worked example
Sentence: "Neither the manager nor the assistants ___ aware of the change." Options: was, were. Reasoning: With "neither ... nor," the verb agrees with the nearer subject. The nearer subject is "assistants," which is plural, so the correct form is "were." The singular "manager" does not control the verb here.
Traps that cost marks
- Long prepositional phrases hiding the real subject.
- Collective nouns such as "team" or "committee" treated as plural when the sentence treats them as one unit.
- "One of the + plural noun + who/that" taking a singular verb incorrectly.
- Dangling modifiers: "Walking home, the rain started" illogically says the rain walked.
- Inversion after "not only," "rarely," or "under no circumstances" requiring auxiliary-before-subject order.