General English (Up to Class X Level)

What the official syllabus says

Preliminary Examination, Paper-II, General Studies-II:

• General English upto Class X level.

General English Upto Class X Level:

• Comprehension
• Active Voice and Passive Voice
• Parts of Speech
• Transformation of Sentences
• Direct and Indirect Speech
• Punctuation and Spellings
• Words meanings
• Vocabulary & Usage
• Idioms and Phrases
• Fill in the Blanks

Topics in detail

Comprehension

• Unseen passages with questions on the main idea, details, inference and vocabulary (see Comprehension)

Active voice and passive voice

• Changing the voice in each tense: simple, continuous and perfect forms
• Passive with modals (can, should, must be done)
• Imperative sentences in the passive (Let it be done)
• Sentences with two objects; dropping the agent (by them, by people)
• Verbs that do not take a passive (intransitive verbs)

Parts of speech

• The eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection
• Kinds of nouns: proper, common, collective, material, abstract; countable and uncountable
• Kinds of pronouns: personal, reflexive, relative, demonstrative, indefinite
• Adjectives and their degrees of comparison; order of adjectives
• Articles and determiners: a, an, the, some, any, much, many, few, little
• Verbs: transitive and intransitive, auxiliaries and modals, tenses, subject-verb agreement
• Adverbs and their position in a sentence
• Prepositions of time, place and direction; prepositions after particular words
• Coordinating and subordinating conjunctions
• The same word as different parts of speech (a run, to run)

Transformation of sentences

• Simple, compound and complex sentences, and changing one into another
• Affirmative and negative sentences without changing the meaning
• Assertive, interrogative and exclamatory sentences
• Degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative forms of the same statement
• Too ... to and so ... that; no sooner ... than; hardly ... when

Direct and indirect speech

• Change of reporting verb (said to, told, asked, ordered, exclaimed)
• Change of tense after a past reporting verb, and when it does not change (universal truths)
• Change of pronouns and of words of time and place (now to then, today to that day, here to there)
• Reporting questions, commands, requests, exclamations and wishes

Punctuation and spellings

• Full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks
• Apostrophe for possession and contraction; quotation marks; hyphen; capital letters
• Commonly misspelt words (accommodate, occurrence, separate, necessary, committee, government)
• Spelling rules: doubling consonants, dropping final e, ie and ei

Word meanings, vocabulary and usage

• Synonyms and antonyms
• Homophones and confusable words (affect and effect, principal and principle, stationary and stationery)
• One-word substitutes
• Prefixes and suffixes; word formation
• Phrasal verbs (put off, give up, look into, carry out)
• Collocations and correct usage; spotting errors in a sentence

Idioms and phrases

• Meanings of common idioms (a bolt from the blue, to burn the midnight oil, to call a spade a spade, at arm's length)
• Choosing the idiom that fits a sentence

Fill in the blanks

• Choosing the right article, preposition, tense, conjunction or word by context
• Sentence completion with one or two blanks