Grammar & Usage — NDA English

A grammar question at NDA level is rarely a trick of interpretation — it is a rule you either know cold or don't. The entire chapter runs on five closed rule-systems: agreement and tense, sentence correction, voice conversion, narration (reported speech), and fixed prepositions/conjunctions/articles. Learn each system's mechanical steps and correctness becomes a checklist, not a guess.

1. What NDA actually asks

Grammar & Usage carries weightPct 30 of NDA English. English itself is 50 of GAT's 150 questions (200 of the 600 GAT marks), so Grammar & Usage alone is worth roughly 15 of the 50 English questions — about 60 of the 200 English marks. It shares the top spot exactly with Reading Comprehension (also 30%); together the two make up 60% of the English paper, while Vocabulary (25%) and Cloze Test/Ordering (15%) fill the rest. Every GAT question — English or General Knowledge — carries +4 for a correct answer and −1.3333 for a wrong one (1/3 of 4 marks, the standard GAT penalty); an unattempted question costs nothing.

Five question formats recur across NDA papers, and almost nothing outside them:

1. Spotting errors — a sentence split into three or four underlined/lettered parts (plus "No error"); find the part containing a grammatical mistake.
2. Sentence improvement — an underlined portion of an otherwise correct sentence; pick the best replacement, or "No improvement" if the original already works.
3. Active–passive voice conversion — rewrite a sentence in the other voice, across the full range of tenses and moods.
4. Direct–indirect (reported) speech conversion — rewrite a quoted sentence as reported speech, or vice versa.
5. Fill in the blanks — a single missing preposition, conjunction, or article dropped into a complete sentence.

NDA does not test synonyms or antonyms here — that lives in a separate Vocabulary chapter — nor paragraph-level cloze passages, which sit under Cloze Test & Ordering. This chapter is pure sentence-level grammatical correctness, and it stays at the level of a CBSE Class 10–12 grammar syllabus: no archaic exceptions, no debated style points, just the rules a well-edited English sentence obeys.

2. Spotting errors — five recurring patterns

a. Subject–verb agreement. The verb must match its true subject in number, and the exam hides the subject behind distractors.

• Intervening phrases: "The bouquet of roses was left on the table" — the subject is bouquet (singular), not roses.
• Either/or, neither/nor: the verb agrees with the nearer subject — "Neither the captain nor the soldiers were informed."
• Each, every, everyone, either, neither, one of → always singular — "Each of the officers has signed the register."
• Collective nouns (army, team, jury, government) take a singular verb when acting as one unit, plural when members act individually.
• There is/are: agreement follows the noun that comes after — "There are three files on the desk," not "there is."

b. Tense consistency. Within a sentence, the tense of one clause must logically match the other.

• Two past actions in a single sentence must not mix simple past with present: "He finished the report and submitted it," not "finished... submits."
• Since pairs with a point in time and a perfect tense — "He has been in service since 2019." For pairs with a duration — "He has worked here for seven years."
• Conditionals follow fixed pairings: real/future condition — "If it rains, the parade will be postponed"; unreal present — "If I were you, I would apply now" (subjunctive were, not was); unreal past — "If he had trained harder, he would have qualified."
• Universal truths stay in the present even inside a past-tense sentence — "The instructor explained that the earth revolves around the sun," not revolved.

c. Article usage. A/an is chosen by the sound, not the letter, that follows: "an hour" (silent h), "a university" (consonant sound /j/), "a one-rupee note" (consonant sound /w/), "an honest officer" (silent h), "an MBA" (vowel sound /em/). The is required before superlatives ("the fastest runner"), ordinals ("the second attempt"), unique objects ("the sun," "the Constitution"), rivers/mountain ranges/oceans ("the Ganga," "the Himalayas"), and nationalities used collectively ("the Gorkhas"). Zero article applies to abstract/uncountable nouns in a general sense ("Discipline matters"), most proper nouns, plural countable nouns used generally ("Soldiers train hard"), names of languages and meals ("speaks Hindi," "had breakfast"), and most sports and games.

d. Preposition usage. A fixed set of adjective/verb + preposition pairings is tested repeatedly: different from (not than), married to, angry with a person but angry at a situation, proud of, capable of, senior/junior/superior/inferior to, prefer X to Y, independent of, dependent/reliant on, interested in, good/bad at, arrive at a building/point but arrive in a city/country, agree to a proposal but agree with a person, comprises (no preposition) or consists of (never "comprised of").

e. Pronoun–antecedent agreement. A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number and gender, and point to exactly one candidate. "Every officer must carry his or her identity card" — singular indefinite subject, singular pronoun. "When Rahul met Aman, he seemed anxious" is ambiguous — the correct version names the person or restructures the sentence. Use who/whom for people, which for things, that for either in a restrictive (defining) clause.

3. Sentence improvement / correction

The format gives a full sentence with one portion underlined and four replacement options (often including "No improvement"). Work it as a checklist, in order:

1. Grammar first — does the underlined part violate agreement, tense, or article/preposition rules from Section 2?
2. Redundancy — "repeat again," "return back," "each and every" pack two words doing one job; the shorter form is almost always correct.
3. Parallelism — items in a list or a paired construction must share the same grammatical form: "She enjoys reading, swimming, and cycling," not "reading, to swim, and cycling." Correlatives must balance too — "not only disciplined but also courteous," matching adjective with adjective on both sides.
4. Dangling/misplaced modifiers — an opening participial phrase must describe the subject right after the comma: "Marching for hours, the soldiers finally reached camp" is correct; "Marching for hours, the camp came into view" makes the camp march.
5. Comparative/superlative form — two things compared take the comparative ("the taller of the two"), three or more take the superlative ("the tallest of the three"); never double up ("more taller").
6. Read the survivor in your head — once grammar rules are satisfied, the correct choice is the one that is also the most concise and natural; a technically-grammatical but clunky option loses to a cleaner one only when both are equally correct — never let concision override an actual grammar rule.

4. Active voice ↔ passive voice

The passive moves the object of the action into the subject position: O + be-verb + past participle (+ by + S). Every tense has a fixed passive form — memorise the auxiliary that carries the tense:

Other conversions NDA tests:

• Yes/no questions: invert the auxiliary — "Does he write the report?" → "Is the report written by him?"
• Wh-questions: the wh-word stays in front — "What did he write?" → "What was written by him?"
• Imperatives (commands): "Close the gate" → "Let the gate be closed." Requests use a different frame — "Please open the door" → "You are requested to open the door."
• Two objects (indirect + direct): either object can head the passive — "He gave me a medal" → "I was given a medal (by him)" or "A medal was given to me (by him)."
• Dropping the agent: when the doer is unknown, obvious, or unimportant, "by + agent" is simply omitted — "Rice is grown in Punjab," not "…is grown by farmers by Punjab."

5. Direct ↔ indirect (reported) speech

Converting a quoted sentence into reported speech shifts three things together: the reporting verb, the tense (backshift, one step into the past), and pronouns/time-place words (to match the reporter's perspective).

Tense backshift (skip this step only if the reporting verb is in the present tense, or the quoted statement is a general truth):

Time and place words shift with the perspective: now → then, today → that day, tomorrow → the next/following day, yesterday → the day/previous day before, here → there, this → that, these → those, ago → before.

By sentence type:

• Statements: "said" stays "said" (no listener named); "said to X" becomes "told X." He said, "I am tired." → He said (that) he was tired.
• Yes/no questions: reporting verb becomes asked; introduce if/whether; revert to statement word order (no auxiliary inversion), drop the question mark. She said, "Do you have the keys?" → She asked if I had the keys.
• Wh-questions: reporting verb becomes asked; keep the wh-word, but use statement word order. He said, "Where are you going?" → He asked where I was going.
• Commands/requests: reporting verb becomes ordered/told/requested/advised + object + to-infinitive; negative commands use not to. The officer said, "Stand at ease." → The officer ordered the men to stand at ease. She said, "Don't be late." → She told me not to be late.
• Exclamations/wishes: the reporting verb carries the emotion — "exclaimed with joy/sorrow that" — and interjections drop out. He said, "Hurrah! We have won." → He exclaimed with joy that they had won.

6. Fill in the blanks — prepositions, conjunctions, articles

This format gives one complete sentence with a single missing word and four options — almost always a preposition, a conjunction, or an article.

Fixed prepositions to know cold: congratulate/congratulated on, apologise for an act but apologise to a person, listen to, look after (take care of) / look for* (search) / look into* (investigate), depend/rely on, insist on, succeed in a task but succeed to a throne/position, deal in goods but deal with a problem, invest in, specialise in, by accident/mistake/chance, on time (punctual) vs in time (with time to spare), at night but in the morning/evening.

Conjunction pairs tested as a unit — never mix halves from two different pairs: either…or, neither…nor, not only…but also, both…and, no sooner…than, hardly/scarcely…when, so…that (result), such…that (result), as…as (equal comparison), though/although… (never paired with "yet" in formal usage — "Although he was tired, he finished the race," not "Although he was tired, yet he finished").

Articles in the blank: apply the sound-based a/an rule and the the/zero rules from Section 2(c) directly — the trap is almost always a superlative or a unique-object noun taking the where a student instinctively reaches for a, or a general-sense plural/uncountable noun wrongly given the.

8. Common traps

• Agreeing the verb with the nearest noun instead of the true subject — always strip the intervening phrase mentally before checking number.
• Treating "each/every/one of/neither/either" as plural because a plural noun sits nearby — these indefinite subjects are always grammatically singular.
• Mixing "by" with a passive that has no stated agent — if the doer is generic or unknown, drop the "by" phrase entirely rather than inventing one.
• Forgetting the backshift in reported speech when the reporting verb is past — "said" pulls every present-tense verb in the quote one step into the past, except universal truths.
• Confusing "since" (point in time) with "for" (duration) — "since 2020" but "for four years," never the reverse.
• Pairing "although" with "yet" or mixing halves of two different correlative pairs ("neither… or", "not only… and also") — each pair is fixed and closed; no substitutions.
• Choosing "a" or "an" by the written letter instead of the spoken sound — "an hour," "a university," "an MBA" all break the naive letter-based rule.

9. Revision protocol

This chapter rewards rule-recall speed more than reasoning — there are exactly five systems (agreement/tense/article/preposition/pronoun for error-spotting, plus voice and narration as their own closed transformations), and every NDA question is an instance of one of them. Write out the active-to-passive table and the reported-speech backshift table from memory daily until the auxiliary changes are automatic. Then drill fifteen mixed questions where the first step is always classification — which of the five systems is this sentence testing — before touching the actual correction; that classification instinct, built through repetition, is what separates a 30-second answer from a hesitant guess.