PSLE grammar cloze: the rules examiners test most

The grammar cloze in Paper 2 (Booklet B) gives a passage with blanks you fill with grammatically correct words in your own answer. It rewards a solid grasp of the rules examiners test again and again — and reading the whole sentence, not just the gap.

The rules that recur

A handful of areas come up over and over: tenses (matching the passage's time frame), subject–verb agreement (singular vs plural), prepositions (in/on/at, depend on, good at), articles (a/an/the), connectors (although, because, however), and pronouns. Drilling these families covers most blanks.

Use the whole sentence

The right answer usually depends on words around the blank, not just next to it. Read the full sentence — and sometimes the sentence before — to fix the tense and meaning. A blank that looks ambiguous on its own is often decided by a time word (“yesterday”, “every day”) elsewhere in the sentence.

Common slips

Watch tense consistency across the passage, agreement when the subject is far from the verb, and prepositions in fixed phrases (which must be learned, not reasoned). Spelling counts here too — a correct word spelt wrongly loses the mark. Re-read each filled blank inside the sentence to check it actually sounds right.