5 Commonly Tested Question Types in 40 Questions for P3 & P4 English

The mas­ter war tac­ti­cian, Sun Tzu, famous­ly advised us to “know your ene­my” so that “in a hun­dred per­ils you will nev­er be in per­il”. Although we do not want stu­dents to regard exam­i­na­tions as war, the anal­o­gy is an apt one. If stu­dents pre­pared them­selves by mas­ter­ing every type of ques­tion they might be test­ed on, they would always excel in any assess­ment and “nev­er be in per­il”.

The truth is that while worth­while, doc­u­ment­ing and cat­e­goris­ing ques­tions is an extreme­ly labo­ri­ous task. The good news, how­ev­er, is that we have done the heavy lift­ing for you. We have tak­en it upon our­selves to trawl through count­less exam­i­na­tion papers and record­ed every sin­gle type of ques­tion that has been test­ed.

From 2017 to 2022, we have sort­ed and record­ed slight­ly over 40 dif­fer­ent gram­mar ques­tion types that schools in Sin­ga­pore have test­ed their Pri­ma­ry 3 and 4 stu­dents. We have even not­ed down the fre­quen­cy of which these ques­tion types get test­ed.

There are 5 gram­mar ques­tion types that are always test­ed in P3 and P4 exam­i­na­tions with­out fail. They are:

1. Tens­es
2. Reflex­ive Pro­nouns
3. Demon­stra­tives
4. Col­lec­tive Nouns
5. Count­able & Uncount­able Nouns

For exam­ples and a short mas­ter­class of these 5 gram­mar ques­tion types, please watch:

Tens­es are by far the most fre­quent­ly test­ed ques­tion type. There are also quite a vari­ety of ways Tens­es can be test­ed. To give your child some extra prac­tice, we have giv­en you com­pli­men­ta­ry access to an abridged ver­sion of our P3 & P4 Smart Study­ing Exam Notes and Prac­tice:

In addi­tion to these com­mon­ly test­ed ques­tion types, there are oth­ers that are not always test­ed but still very impor­tant to expose your child to. Here are exam­ples of 3 of them:

Question Type 1: None of

2017 P3 SA1 Pei Chun Pub­lic School

It was rain­ing heav­i­ly last night but luck­i­ly, _________________ of the flights was can­celled so it did not affect our vaca­tion.

(1)  all

(2)  none

(3)  most

(4)  some

Answer & Expla­na­tion: None of is always fol­lowed by a sin­gu­lar verb. Because of “was can­celled”, we know that the answer must be “none of the flights”.

2017 P4 SA2 Nanyang Pri­ma­ry School

Dur­ing last week’s audi­tion, none of my friends _________________ select­ed for the dance com­pe­ti­tion.

(1)  is

(2)  are

(3)  was 

(4)  were

Answer & Expla­na­tion: None of is always fol­lowed by a sin­gu­lar verb. “None of my friends” should thus be fol­lowed by either “is” or “was”. Since the audi­tion hap­pened last week, the verb should be in the past tense and so the answer is “was”.

Question Type 2: Who’s VS Whose

2017 P3 SA2 SCGS

“_________________ idea was it to come here?” Ahmad whined.

(1)  Who

(2)  Which

(3)  Where

(4)  Whose

2017 P4 SA2 ACS (Junior)

_________________ shirts are these?

(1)  Who

(2)  Who’s

(3)  Whom

(4)  Whose

Answer & Expla­na­tion: The above two ques­tions are test­ing whether stu­dents know the dif­fer­ence between “who’s” and “whose”. The for­mer means “who is” and does not fit the two ques­tions. There­fore, the answer is “Whose” for both ques­tions.

Question Type 3: Adverbs of frequency

2017 P3 SA2 Maha Bod­hi

Krish­na is a respon­si­ble boy. He _________________ sub­mits his work on time.

(1)  nev­er

(2)  rarely

(3)  always

(4)  some­times

Answer & Expla­na­tion: The 4 options giv­en in this ques­tion are exam­ples of adverbs of fre­quen­cy. In this ques­tion, the key word is “respon­si­ble”. Since Krish­na is a respon­si­ble boy, it can­not be the case that he “nev­er”, “rarely” or “some­times” sub­mits his work on time. The answer must be he “always” sub­mits his work on time.

There are of course many oth­er types of ques­tions for gram­mar and oth­er sec­tions as well. The pur­pose of this arti­cle was not to pro­vide you with an exhaus­tive cov­er­age of exam­inable ques­tion types but to show you the impor­tance of what we do — study­ing exam trends and expos­ing your child to as many ques­tions as pos­si­ble.

This is one of our secret sauces to help­ing our stu­dents achieve exam excel­lence. Your child will def­i­nite­ly learn and ben­e­fit from it when he or she expe­ri­ences learn­ing with us.