Grammar, Vocabulary and Usage

What the official syllabus says

Paper 2: English (Main Examination), type of question 5:

ENGLISH GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY AND USAGE. (Marks allotted: 60)

Note: Total 30 multiple choice questions will be asked. In case of wrong answer, multiple answers for the same question and not encoding any option in OMR Answer Sheet, 0.6 (six tenths) marks will be deducted.

The syllabus gives no list of grammar topics. The advertisement sets the paper's standard at the English subject (lower level) of the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board, so the list below covers standard school grammar and usage.

Topics in detail

Grammar

• Parts of speech and their functions in a sentence.
• Nouns: countable and uncountable, number, gender, possessive forms.
• Pronouns: kinds, case, agreement with the noun they stand for.
• Articles: a, an, the, and when none is used.
• Adjectives and adverbs: kinds, degrees of comparison, order and position.
• Verbs: tenses and their use; regular and irregular forms; auxiliaries and modals (can, could, may, might, must, should, would, ought to).
• Subject-verb agreement, including collective nouns, "either...or", "neither...nor" and "each", "every".
• Active and passive voice.
• Direct and indirect (reported) speech.
• Prepositions of time, place and direction; prepositions that go with particular words.
• Conjunctions and linking words; kinds of sentences (simple, compound, complex) and transforming one into another.
• Conditional sentences; question tags; non-finite forms (infinitive, gerund, participle).

Vocabulary

• Synonyms and antonyms.
• One-word substitution.
• Idioms and phrases, and phrasal verbs, with their meanings.
• Words often confused (for example affect and effect, principal and principle, stationary and stationery).
• Spelling: picking the correctly spelt word.
• Prefixes, suffixes and word families.

Usage

• Spotting the error in a sentence and choosing the correction.
• Sentence improvement: choosing the better phrase for an underlined part.
• Filling in the blank with the right word.
• Arranging jumbled words or sentences into a meaningful order.
• Punctuation and capital letters.

Answering the multiple-choice part

• 30 questions for 60 marks, on an OMR sheet.
• 0.6 marks are deducted for a wrong answer, for more than one answer, and for not encoding any option, so a question left blank also loses 0.6 marks under the note.

Overlaps

Correct grammar also underlies the essay, precis and translation in this paper.