English Grammar: 115 MCQs with Answers

The sentence expresses a confident deduction. Since the person has been working all day, the speaker is almost certain that he is tired, and English marks such a logical conclusion about the present with ‘must’. ‘Can’ would express ability or theoretical possibility rather than certainty, and in this sense it normally appears only in questions or negatives. ‘Should’ would express obligation or mild expectation, which is not intended here. ‘Need’ is a semi-modal used for necessity, chiefly in negatives and questions, and it does not fit an affirmative deduction of this kind.

In the incidental method grammar is not taught as a separate subject with a syllabus of rules. Learners meet the language in reading, conversation and composition, and the teacher explains a grammatical point only when a need for it arises out of actual usage or when an error has to be corrected. Grammar is thus absorbed through use rather than memorised in advance. The inductive method still ends in the statement of a rule, though it begins with examples; the remedial method is meant to remove specific errors; and the descriptive approach belongs to grammatical theory.

In ‘He left her everything he possessed’, ‘He’ is the subject and ‘left’ the finite verb. The verb ‘leave’ is here used ditransitively, that is with two objects: ‘her’ is the indirect object naming the person who benefits, and ‘everything he possessed’ is the direct object naming the thing transferred. The pattern is therefore Subject–Verb–Indirect Object–Direct Object, abbreviated SVOO. There is no adverbial of place, time or manner in the sentence, so patterns containing A are ruled out, and no word completes the meaning of an object, so there is no complement either.

The bilingual method was developed by the Welsh scholar C. J. Dodson in the 1960s. It gives the mother tongue a controlled and carefully limited place in the language classroom: the teacher supplies mother-tongue equivalents of sentences while the learners repeat only the target-language forms, so that comprehension is instant and no time is wasted on elaborate demonstration. Meaning is conveyed once through translation and afterwards the mother tongue is progressively withdrawn. The method thus stands between the direct method, which excludes the first language, and the grammar-translation method, which relies on it heavily.

Garrulous describes a person who talks a great deal, especially about unimportant things, so its synonym is talkative. Gibberish means speech or writing that is rapid, confused and impossible to understand, hence unintelligible speech or writing. Gregarious describes someone who enjoys the company of others and, of animals, those that live in flocks or herds, so it corresponds to sociable. Gigantic means of enormous size, and its synonym here is immense. All four words happen to begin with the letter g, which is what makes the set a convenient vocabulary exercise.

The correct British spelling is ‘manoeuvre’, from the French ‘manœuvre’, meaning a planned movement of troops or vehicles, or a skilful and often cunning action. The vowel sequence runs o-e-u, and the word ends in ‑re as in ‘centre’ and ‘theatre’. American English simplifies it to ‘maneuver’, but ‘manoeuver’ mixes the two systems and is not standard in either. The other options reverse the vowels into ‘ouev’ or ‘ouev’ combinations and are simply misspellings. Related forms are manoeuvrable, manoeuvrability and manoeuvring.

The reported sentence is a yes-no question, so the reporting verb becomes ‘asked’ and the question is introduced by ‘if’ or ‘whether’, with the interrogative word order changed to statement order. Because the reporting verb ‘said’ is in the past, the tenses shift back: ‘do you know’ becomes ‘he knew’ and ‘she will go’ becomes ‘she would go’. The pronouns must also be adjusted to the reporter’s point of view, so ‘you’ becomes ‘he’ while ‘she’ remains unchanged. The correct form is therefore ‘I asked him if he knew when she would go home.’

‘Altogether’ is a single-word adverb meaning completely, entirely or wholly, and in a negative sentence such as ‘My new house isn’t altogether finished’ it conveys that the work is not quite complete. It must be distinguished from ‘all together’, written as two words, which means all in one place or all at the same time, as in ‘The family sat all together.’ ‘Just’ before ‘finished’ would change the meaning to a very recent completion, and ‘almost’ would produce a double weakening that reverses the intended sense of the negative.

To be ‘on tenterhooks’ is to be in a state of anxious suspense while waiting for something uncertain to happen, which is exactly the parents’ condition until their children came back safe and sound. The image comes from the tenter, a frame on which newly woven cloth was stretched taut by hooks so that it dried without shrinking. ‘Out of the wood’ means free from danger, which is the opposite of what is required; ‘on the sly’ means secretly; and ‘out and out’ means thorough or complete, and is used as an intensifying adjective.

A simple sentence contains only one finite verb and therefore only one clause. In ‘It was too long a talk to hold the interest of the listeners’, the only finite verb is ‘was’; the phrase ‘to hold the interest of the listeners’ is a to-infinitive, which is a non-finite form and does not create a clause of its own. Since there is no subordinating conjunction and no coordinating conjunction joining two finite clauses, the sentence is neither complex nor compound. Infinitives, participles and gerunds often make a simple sentence look longer than it is.