English Grammar — Conditionals, Degrees of Comparison and Question Tags

Three small areas of English grammar produce a steady stream of marks because they are rule-governed, not vocabulary-governed. You cannot guess your way through a question tag, but you also cannot get one wrong once you know the rule — there is nothing to remember beyond the pattern.

Between them, conditionals, degrees of comparison and question tags appear in error spotting, fill in the blanks, sentence improvement and the rearrangement questions of SSC CGL and CHSL, in Railway NTPC and Group D, in the Part I English paper of BPSC TRE-4, and in the language section of CTET.

What all three share is a fixed shape. A conditional has four shapes, a comparison has three, a tag has six rules. Learn the shape and the sentence answers itself — which is why ten focused minutes here return more than an hour spent on vocabulary lists.

1. Fill in the blank: "If I ______ you, I would accept the offer."

2. Fill in the blank: "He is senior ______ me by three years."

3. Choose the correct question tag: "You used to play cricket, ______?"

4. Fill in the blank: "If she had left earlier, she ______ the train."

5. Choose the correct question tag: "Nothing was stolen from the house, ______?"

6. Choose the grammatically correct sentence.

7. Fill in the blank: "Walk quickly ______ you should miss the bus."

8. Fill in the blanks: "The ______ you climb, the ______ the air becomes."