CUET (Common University Entrance Test) is an entrance test for admissions into undergraduate programs of Central Universities of India. Apart from central universities, other state universities and private universities are likely to accept CUET scores for admission into their undergraduate programs. The exam is conducted by NTA (National Testing Agency), an Indian government test taking agency that conducts different entrance exams for educational institutions.
To crack CUET exam successfully, the candidate has to understand the paper pattern and the syllabus. Here in this article, we will focus on the English syllabus of CUET. As per the syllabus prescribed by NTA, the English section (Section A) comprises the following topics:
- Reading Comprehension
- Sentence Arrangement
- Fill in the blanks/Cloze test
- Antonyms and Synonyms
- Basic Grammar
The entire CUET English syllabus can be divided into these five categories. In fact, the entire syllabus of English aptitude for any exam can be divided into these five topics, because there is nothing in English aptitude that falls out of these five. Let’s understand the preparation strategy for each of these topics, by taking the topics in the order in which they should be studied.
Basic Grammar
If someone wants to do well in CUET English Section, one should have a good command over basic grammar. Without grammar it is very difficult to develop speed reading. People often confuse academic grammar with aptitude grammar.
The syllabus of academic grammar is huge and has a number of topics that never come in aptitude tests, whereas the syllabus of aptitude grammar is simple and is limited to not more than eight to nine important topics.
We have discussed all the grammar topics of CUET English section. You can click on this link to get a fair understanding of what topics to prepare for, what to ignore, and how to go about preparing for basic English grammar for CUET exam
Sentence Arrangement
This topic is also sometimes called as Para jumbles. In aptitude tests similar to CUET, sentence arrangement questions come in good numbers. The questions test the student’s ability to arrange different fragments of a sentence in the right logical order such that the order makes complete logical sense.
One sentence is broken down into four different parts. We have to pick the option that has be the most appropriate logical order. There a good number of examples of such types of questions that we have discussed here.
Fill in the blanks/Cloze test
Fill in the blanks type of questions often test the student’s vocabulary, grammar, and word usage. To correctly answer these types of questions, one should have not only a good familiarity of words but also a good understanding of their usage. Sometimes instead of just one or two blanks, we have a short paragraph with multiple blanks.
These types of passages are called cloze passages. Often the short paragraph has more than five blanks. We have four options for each blank, which, when filled correctly, fetches the student one marks.
Fill in the blanks and cloze type of questions take less time and prove to be scoring areas for the student. You may take a look at a number of such questions and their approach with the solved examples given on this page.
Reading Comprehension
In CUET exam, a number of questions are likely to come from reading comprehension. In the sample paper of CUET website, the English section had three reading comprehension passages, with each passage having 10 questions, making the reading comprehension a very important section.
To do well in this section, one should not only have a good reading speed but also a good vocabulary. This is where both grammar and vocabulary become important.
Without having good command on grammar, one may not be able to understand the syntactical structure of sentences, and without good vocabulary the comprehension of the sentences may not be up to the mark. We have discussed a number of sample Reading Comprehension passages here in this section
Antonyms and Synonyms
Along with grammar, vocabulary forms the backbone of any language. Without these two, it is very difficult for us to understand and learn any language.
Though both active and passive reading play a very important role in improving one’s vocabulary and language skills, there are many shortcut techniques such as word root, suffixes, prefixes using which one can easily derive the correct meaning of any word.
Sometimes just from the context one can easily and correctly guess the meaning of any unfamiliar word. Thus, vocabulary development and improvement may not be as big a challenge as we often think. Nevertheless, one can develop vocabulary directly by solving questions. These are available here.
In this article we have briefly discussed the different topics of the English section of CUET exam. These five topics are the five primary topics which every CUET aspirant should focus on.
In addition to these, the aspirant might come across many other topics such as paragraph summary, paragraph completion, idioms and phrases, phrasal verbs etc. Though they are a little different from what we have discussed above, we can easily master these topics once we have got control on the above five.
We advise all CUET aspirants to thoroughly go through the complete syllabus of CUET English section and also download the sample papers and past year papers. Preparing from these resources is the best way to understand and do well in this exam.
