Vice Principal & Principal 2026 — 5,847 explained questions, 18 chapters and 13 full papers for the DoE Delhi CRT.Start reading
Principal Sarathi VP & Principal 2026

English Language Skills

Syllabus head (ii) — Hindi and English language skills | Chapter 10 of 18

60questions, every one explained
10items in the 2022 paper drew on this chapter

Why this chapter matters

The 2022 CRT paper for these posts carried about 10 English questions out of 120 — at 2.5 marks each, roughly 25 marks, with UPSC's usual negative marking for wrong answers. The questions were not exotic. Every one of them came from the standard, finite toolkit that this chapter teaches:

What the 2022 paper actually asked Skill tested Taught in
One reading-comprehension passage, on online education during COVID (two items; the NEP / mother-tongue passage was in the Hindi section) Read, locate, infer Part A
Spot the error in a sentence The classic error patterns Part H
little / a little and few / a few fill-ins Quantifiers Part E
Change the voice (active ↔ passive) Voice transformation Part F
Change the narration (direct ↔ indirect) Narration rules Part G
The word "up" used as different parts of speech Word classes by function Part B
Erudition = great scholarship; truant = pupil absent without leave; incorrigible = incapable of being corrected One-word substitutions Part I
Idioms and phrasal verbs (no synonym or antonym item) Vocabulary banks Part I (idioms)

Notice what this table means: every 2022 English question type is drillable in advance. The passages change; the question types do not. The three one-word substitutions asked in 2022 all sit in the standard list every serious aspirant memorises — and all three are in Part I, flagged [2022].

Three questions from this chapter, solved

Every one of the 60 items is written this way — the answer, and why each wrong option is wrong.

Passage I. When schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching moved almost overnight to mobile phones and computer screens. For many urban students the change was inconvenient but manageable; for lakhs of children in poorer households it meant a long interruption of learning, because a smartphone, a stable internet connection and a quiet corner at home could not be taken for granted. Surveys conducted during 2020 and 2021 reported that many children shared a single device with siblings and working parents. Teachers, too, had to master new tools with little training. The episode taught planners two lessons: technology can extend the reach of good teaching, but it cannot replace the school; and any digital programme must first close the access gap, or it will quietly widen the very inequalities it claims to address.

The central concern of Passage I is:

  1. (a) the technical superiority of online teaching over classroom teaching
  2. (b) how the sudden shift to online learning exposed unequal access to education
  3. (c) the refusal of teachers to learn new technology
  4. (d) the permanent replacement of schools by technology
Answer (b).

A main-idea answer must cover the whole passage (Part A, Step 4): the passage keeps returning to unequal access. (a) and (d) contradict the line "it cannot replace the school" — (d) also uses the extreme word "permanent"; (c) blames teachers, which the passage never does.

Directions: Fill in the blank: articles, prepositions, quantifiers (Q17–Q22)

___ learning is a dangerous thing.

  1. (a) Little
  2. (b) A little
  3. (c) The little
  4. (d) Few
Answer (b).

The proverb means "some shallow learning" — positive small amount with the uncountable noun learning → A little (Part E). (a) "Little" would mean "hardly any learning is dangerous", reversing the proverb; (d) "Few" cannot precede an uncountable noun.

Passage I. When schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching moved almost overnight to mobile phones and computer screens. For many urban students the change was inconvenient but manageable; for lakhs of children in poorer households it meant a long interruption of learning, because a smartphone, a stable internet connection and a quiet corner at home could not be taken for granted. Surveys conducted during 2020 and 2021 reported that many children shared a single device with siblings and working parents. Teachers, too, had to master new tools with little training. The episode taught planners two lessons: technology can extend the reach of good teaching, but it cannot replace the school; and any digital programme must first close the access gap, or it will quietly widen the very inequalities it claims to address.

Which step would the author most likely support?

  1. (a) expanding digital programmes only after the access gap is closed
  2. (b) ending the use of technology in education altogether
  3. (c) making online learning compulsory for all schools immediately
  4. (d) leaving the purchase of devices entirely to families
Answer (a).

The passage says a digital programme "must first close the access gap" — so expansion comes after access. (b) is extreme ("altogether"); (c) reverses the author's caution; (d) ignores the access-gap argument entirely.

READING COMPREHENSION: A SCORING SYSTEM, NOT A READING TEST

In 2022 one short passage carried two of the ten English questions (the Principal paper, likewise, had one two-item passage). Candidates lose these marks not because the passages are hard — they are simple expository prose on education topics — but because they read aimlessly. Use this six-step system.

Step 1 — Read the question stems first (30–40 seconds). Not the options; just the stems. Now you know what to hunt for while reading.

Step 2 — Read the passage once at normal speed. Do not underline everything. Mentally tag the sentence that answers each stem you remember.

Step 3 — Locate and paraphrase. For a detail question, the correct option is almost always a paraphrase of one passage sentence — same meaning, different words. Match meaning, not vocabulary. An option that recycles the passage's exact words is often a trap wrapped around a twisted meaning.

Step 4 — Know which question type you are facing.

Question type How to recognise it How to answer it
Stated fact "According to the passage…" You must be able to point to the line. If you cannot, the option is wrong.
Inference "It can be concluded / implied that…" Choose what must follow from the passage — not what is merely possible, and never what you know from outside.
Main idea / title "The central idea / most suitable title is…" The option covering the whole passage in the fewest words. An option about one paragraph is a detail, not a title.
Tone "The author's tone is…" Judge from the author's verbs and adjectives: balanced, critical, optimistic, analytical.
Word in context "Here, the word/phrase X means…" Re-read the sentence with each option substituted; keep the one that preserves the sentence's sense.

Step 5 — Eliminate extreme options. Words like always, never, only, all, none, must, completely make an option easy to disprove. Exam passages hedge ("often", "may", "largely"); correct options usually hedge too.

Step 6 — Run the time budget. One passage with two questions (the 2022 pattern) deserves about three minutes: roughly one and a half minutes to read the passage, thirty to forty seconds per question. If one inference item is still resisting you after ninety seconds, eliminate what you can, mark your best remaining option, and move on — a 2.5-mark item must not eat ten minutes.

Trap: The passages in this exam are about education — your own field. That is precisely the danger. An option can be true of the real world (or of the NEP you studied in Chapter 4) and still wrong, because the passage never says it. Answer from the passage alone.

The rest of this chapter

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