English Language Skills
60practice questions
10items in the 2022 paper
1rich-format items
0★ volatile facts
Unlock this chapter → Read a free chapter first
Why this chapter matters
The 2022 CRT paper for these posts carried about 10 English questions out of 120 — at 2.5 marks each, roughly 25 marks, with UPSC's usual negative marking for wrong answers. The questions were not exotic. Every one of them came from the standard, finite toolkit that this chapter teaches:
| What the 2022 paper actually asked | Skill tested | Taught in |
|---|---|---|
| Two reading-comprehension passages — one on online education during COVID, one on NEP and mother-tongue instruction | Read, locate, infer | Part A |
| Spot the error in a sentence | The classic error patterns | Part H |
| little / a little and few / a few fill-ins | Quantifiers | Part E |
| Change the voice (active ↔ passive) | Voice transformation | Part F |
| Change the narration (direct ↔ indirect) | Narration rules | Part G |
| The word "up" used as different parts of speech | Word classes by function | Part B |
| Erudition = great scholarship; truant = pupil absent without leave; incorrigible = incapable of being corrected | One-word substitutions | Part I |
| Idioms, synonyms and antonyms | Vocabulary banks | Part I |
Notice what this table means: every 2022 English question type is drillable in advance. The passages change; the question types do not. The three one-word substitutions asked in 2022 all sit in the standard list every serious aspirant memorises — and all three are in Part I, flagged [2022].
What this chapter covers
- PREREQUISITES
- READING COMPREHENSION: A SCORING SYSTEM, NOT A READING TEST
- PARTS OF SPEECH AND THE "SAME WORD, DIFFERENT ROLES" TRAP
- ARTICLES AND PREPOSITIONS
- TENSES AND SUBJECT–VERB AGREEMENT
- THE QUANTIFIER SET: FEW / A FEW / THE FEW AND LITTLE / A LITTLE / THE LITTLE
- ACTIVE AND PASSIVE VOICE
- DIRECT AND INDIRECT NARRATION
- ERROR SPOTTING: THE 25 HIGHEST-FREQUENCY PATTERNS
- THE VOCABULARY BANKS
- SPELLING: SIX RULES AND THE FORTY USUAL SUSPECTS
- THE EXAMINER'S ANGLE
- COMMON ERRORS THAT COST MARKS
- COMPRESSED REVISION SHEET