English
The English section of the FBR Preventive Officer test checks whether you can read a customs notice, a seizure report or a newspaper editorial and answer precisely. Expect sentence completion, synonyms and antonyms in context, idiom substitution, error spotting, active-passive and direct-indirect conversion, and one short comprehension passage.
Rules that decide most questions
- Subject-verb agreement ignores interrupting phrases: 'The list of confiscated items was ...' - the verb follows the head noun, not the nearest noun.
- 'Each, every, either, neither, anyone, nobody' are singular; in 'neither ... nor', the verb agrees with the nearer subject.
- 'A number of' takes a plural verb; 'the number of' takes a singular one.
- Prepositions are fixed by usage: comply with, consist of, deprive of, averse to, capable of, insist on, prefer to.
- In reported speech, shift the tense back one step and adjust time and place words: today becomes that day, here becomes there.
Worked example
'Neither the inspector nor his assistants ___ aware of the revised valuation ruling.' The verb agrees with the subject nearer to it - 'assistants', which is plural - so 'were' is correct. Reverse the order to 'Neither the assistants nor the inspector' and the answer becomes 'was'. Two candidates can know the rule and still lose the mark by reading the first noun only.
Traps that cost marks
Guessing a synonym from the root word - treating 'notorious' as a compliment, for example - instead of reading the sentence's tone. Answering from general knowledge when the question says 'according to the passage'. Confusing affect/effect, principal/principle, compliment/complement, lie/lay. Losing minutes on a single idiom: mark it and move on, because comprehension carries more marks per minute.