Guide to Become Better at Tenses and Error Spotting

Tenses and error spotting are asked in the General English section of a lot of exams like SSC, Banking exams, RRB, CDS, and Defense Exams.

If you practice enough and have basic rules of grammar clear in your head then these can be very scoring topics allowing you to boost your final score in the exam.

Here in this article, we will look at the details about both the topics and then discuss some things to follow to master solving questions from tenses and error spotting.

Guide to Become Better at Tenses and Error Spotting – What are Tenses?

Tenses are the forms of a verb that are used to express the time of the action that is done by the verb. Let us try to clearly understand tenses with the help of some examples:

1. Esha is writing a book now.
2. Esha has written a book.
3. Esha wrote a book yesterday.
4. Esha was writing a book at that time.
5. Esha will write a book tomorrow.

Here, the same verb which is ‘write’ is used in all the sentences above, but the verb forms are different in each of the sentences.

In the 1^st and 2^nd sentences, the verb forms ‘is writing’, ‘has written’ refers to the present time.

In the 3rd and 4^th sentences, the verb forms ‘wrote’, ‘was writing’ refers to the past tense.

In the 5^th sentence, the verb form ‘will write’ is referring to the future time. These different verb forms are called Tenses.

Forms of Tenses

When we talk about the forms of tenses, they often mean these-

• Base form
• Past tense
• Past Participle
• Present Participle

Types of English Grammar Tenses

The 3 types of tenses are –

• Present tense
• Past tense 
• Future tense

This was all about tenses and let us now look at some details about Error Spotting we can discuss the tips to ace in these topics.

Spotting Errors

Error Spotting questions are asked in the General English Paper in the Verbal Ability Section. The questions asked in the error spotting test contain grammatical errors.

The candidates are required to find those errors correctly. Sentences are made up of words and every word is a part of speech, so for identifying an error in a sentence, we should have good knowledge of parts of speech.

You must also work on your grammar as Error Spotting questions are asked to judge a candidate’s entire knowledge of Grammar and parts of speech.

Let us look at the tips you can follow to master both these topics and use them to boost your final score.

Tips to Become Better at Tenses and Error Spotting

Both the topics require a good understanding of Grammar and test the candidate’s ability. If you think you are weak in Grammar, try and fix that first and then think of learning more about these topics.

You must also read newspapers and books to get more used to the English Language and achieving fluency will help you to easily spot the errors.

Even if you are weak in the English language, you can fix it through practice and this will provide you with enough confidence to ace this section.

Make use of practice papers and previous papers to solve different types of questions from these topics.

This was all about Error spotting and Tenses. We hope you found this article insightful and if you have any queries about the topics and would like some help, you can drop them in the comment section below.

Error Spotting Exercise –

1. No sooner had he arrive (1) / than his friends arranged a reception (2) / in his honour (3) / in the best hotel in town. (4) / No error (5)
2. Manali was trying for admission (1) / in the Engineering college (2) / even though her parents wanted (3) / her to take up medicine. (4) / No error(5)
3. Although he had worked hard (1) / and was understanding as much about the subject (2) / as I did (3) / he failed to get a second class in the examination. (4) / No error(5)
4. He told me that (1) / he could not buying the painting, (2) / which he wanted very much (3) / because he had not enough money (4) / No error(5)
5. She has told me that her brother might have done much better (1) / at the university last year (2) / had he not given so much time (3) / to the students union. (4) / No error(5)
6. I will now deal with him (1) / in a manner different (2) / from the one I have adopted so far. (3) / No error (4)

Always keep on learning English with confidence by Pradeep Sir.