English: Grammar, Usage, and Vocabulary
Core skills
English items test grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, and usage. Know subject-verb agreement, pronoun reference, tense consistency, modifier placement, parallelism, and punctuation. For sentence completion, predict a word before reading the choices, then choose the option closest in meaning and tone. For error identification, read the whole sentence: an error may depend on a phrase far from the underlined part.
Common traps
Agreement errors often hide behind prepositional phrases. In “The list of items was long,” the subject is list, not items. Collective nouns such as team or committee usually take a singular verb when acting as one unit. Watch misplaced modifiers: an introductory phrase should describe the noun that follows it. Avoid choices with faulty parallelism, such as mixing a noun with a verb phrase. Vocabulary distractors may be similar in meaning but wrong in tone or collocation.
Rule of thumb
Strip out prepositional phrases to find the true subject, then match the verb. For modifiers, ask who or what is doing the action in the opening phrase. For vocabulary, use context clues and eliminate choices that do not fit the sentence’s logic.
Worked example
Choose the correct verb: “The box of old photographs (was/were) stored in the attic.” Remove “of old photographs.” The subject is box, which is singular, so the answer is was.