Error Spotting, Subject-Verb Agreement and Conditionals for Bihar STET English

Error spotting looks like a guessing game, but it is really a checklist. Sentences in these questions are usually broken in one of a handful of ways, and the syllabus names most of them: subject-verb agreement, prepositions, conditional clauses, non-finites and punctuation. In the previous-year sets we analysed, error spotting, sentence improvement, prepositions and clauses together made up about a quarter of all English questions.

The five-second checklist

Read the sentence once for meaning, then check, in this order:

1. Subject and verb: do they agree in number?
2. Tense and time word: does the verb tense fit the time marker (yesterday, since, by next week)?
3. Preposition: is the right one attached to the verb, adjective or noun?
4. Pronoun and article: does the pronoun match its noun, and is a/an/the needed or unneeded?
5. Word form and order: adjective vs adverb, comparative forms, double negatives.

If nothing is wrong, the answer is "No error", and you should expect it in roughly one question in five or six.

Subject-verb agreement: the rules that carry the marks

• Neither...nor / either...or / or / nor: the verb agrees with the nearer subject. Neither the manager nor his assistants are present.
• Along with, together with, as well as, besides: the verb agrees with the first subject. The principal, along with two teachers, is attending.
• One of the + plural noun: the verb is singular. One of the students has passed.
• Each, every, either, neither + singular noun: singular verb. Each of the boys was given a prize.
• Collective nouns (committee, jury, team): singular when acting as one unit, plural when members act individually.
• Uncountable nouns (furniture, information, advice, news) take a singular verb and no plural -s. The news is good. Not furnitures.
• Words that look plural but are singular: mathematics, physics, news, economics. Mathematics is my favourite subject.
• A number of / the number of: A number of students are absent (plural), but the number of students is small (singular).
• Many a + singular noun: singular verb. Many a man has failed.

Prepositions: learn them as pairs

Do not learn prepositions as isolated words. Learn them with the word they follow.

Pair	Example
angry with a person, at a thing	He is angry with his brother.
prefer X to Y	I prefer tea to coffee.
agree with a person, to a proposal	She agreed to the plan.
congratulate someone on	We congratulated him on his success.
accustomed to	She is accustomed to early mornings.
absorbed in	He was absorbed in the novel.
differ from	This differs from that.
good at, fond of, afraid of	Fond of music, good at drawing

Conditional clauses

Type	Pattern	Example
Zero	If + present, present	If you heat ice, it melts.
First	If + present, will + verb	If it rains, we will stay home.
Second	If + past, would + verb	If I were you, I would apologise.
Third	If + past perfect, would have + V3	If he had studied, he would have passed.

The usual errors are mixing will into the if-clause (If it will rain is wrong) and using would have in the if-clause of a third conditional (If I would have known is wrong; it should be If I had known). Use were for all persons in a second-conditional hypothetical.

Non-finites

Verbs like enjoy, mind, avoid, finish, suggest, practise take the -ing form (enjoy studying). Verbs like want, hope, decide, refuse, manage take to + verb (decided to leave). Let, make, help, see + object take the bare verb (made him wait).

Punctuation in one glance

• Semicolon: joins two closely linked independent clauses. The road was blocked; we took another route.
• Colon: introduces a list, an explanation or a quotation. She bought three things: a book, a pen and a bag.
• Dash: marks a sudden break or emphasis. He finally arrived – two hours late.
• Hyphen: joins compound words. well-known, mother-in-law.
• Exclamation mark: only after real exclamations, never after ordinary statements.
• Capital letters start sentences and proper nouns. A frequent trap in punctuation questions is a wrongly lowercase ganga or india.

Mistakes to avoid when practising

• Do not hunt for errors by "sound" alone. Test each checklist item in order.
• When parts of the sentence are underlined, the error is always in an underlined part; read the remaining text only for context.
• If two options look identical, re-read the instructions. Questions on capitalisation and punctuation often differ only in a comma or a capital letter.

Practice error spotting and sentence correction on Pareeksha

The Bihar STET English series has 25-question timed sets for this: Spotting Errors (5 sets), Sentence Improvement / Correction (6), Grammar: Prepositions (6), Clauses and Sentence Types (5) and Punctuation Marks (2). Each set is a fixed paper, so you can compare your attempts over time. The exam page has the pattern and syllabus in one place.

These questions come from previous-year questions of comparable teacher exams (KVS, EMRS, NVS and state TGT/PGT papers) on the same topics, not from Bihar STET papers themselves.

Next steps

Check the weightage analysis to see where this ranks, then combine with reported speech and passive voice in the 60-day plan. Practise under time in the free test series.