How to prepare for General Ability Paper of ESE in minimum time (Part II)

Those who work at a thing with their whole heart receive help from God – Swami Vivekanand

Till now I have covered 50 marks of English under GA paper of ESE. Today another 50 marks portion of English is discussed. Today I will talk about the other three types of questions that are asked in ESE English paper-

1) Spotting Errors is the most difficult type of question asked by UPSC. Here they check how good is your command over English. In these questions a sentence will be given broken into three underlined phrases, which constitutes your option a b and c. The last option d is ‘No error'.

You have to check whether there is any error in one of these three phrases. Here they may distort the sentence in any possible manner. There may be an error of preposition, subject-verb agreement , verbs and tenses or basic grammer. They can even give you an incorrect word used in a sentence.

For example, they gave a word ‘lose’ in place of ‘loose’ (in ESE-2015 ) as shown below-

 

So here your answer is option b.

So scoring here is not easy as it not only requires a knowledge of grammer but also the correct English usage. So I will tell you what I did. Since not many questions are asked on this type so don’t invest large time in this. I took help of MadeEasy General English book because it has covered all the grammer with a lot of examples. Only read grammer chapters from this book and nothing else. This will make you score good in Spotting errors as well as Sentence Improvement (which was discussed in Part I of this article ).

2) Selecting words is like fill in the blanks. Here you have to fill the given blanks with appropriate words given in options. Mostly these words are nothing but prepositions, pronouns and verbs. So MadeEasy book’s grammer portion will help here also. Other than that it will also require correct word usage as per the context of the paragraph.

To improve my English usage I read the book Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis. It’s a red colored small and thick book which is a very lucid and interesting book to improve your English. It improves your vocabulary many times which will help you in Antonyms/Synonyms type of questions. It will also help you in overall improvement of your English. It is a must read. I always read it 1 or 2 hours everyday to refresh my mind as well as to boost up my English.

3) For Synonyms/Antonyms based questions no need to read any coaching material because nobody knows which words will be asked. So no need to memorise any word meaning. If you read English newspaper, its better, you can take 4-5 words (which are used very often but meaning is not known) everyday, find their meaning and use these words in new sentences framed by your own. This is the only method by which you can remember these words in exam. 

Norman Lewis book is a must read for this section of questions of ESE paper. Its method is different and very organic. Always prefer a quiet environment when reading this book and read this book aloud as if you are talking to yourself.

This is all about today’s Part II of this article on General Ability. Till now I have covered whole English portion of ESE which comprises of 100 marks The next Part III of this article will be on GS portion of GA paper. Keep yourself updated and just think about ESE 2016 and nothing else.

No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.

Do your best in what you control.....everything else will take care of itself.
– Ankit Shukla ( ESE-2015 AIR 38 )

How to prepare for General Ability Paper of ESE in minimum time (Part I)