CDS 1 2020 English paper consists of 12 sections with 10 questions devoted to each section, therefore equally distributing 100 marks in totality. The paper this year has been set with quite an advance intensive level of difficulty & needed an overall depth of thorough grammatical knowledge in the subject to score good marks. The paper is mostly focused on the English grammar & its technicalities & therefore it would have been quite a herculean task for those who had taken the grammar lightly & have just grazed the surface of it. The passages from the Comprehension section in this paper are lesser in number but the candidate needs a good reading habit to ace the word play infused with tricky ideas & complex views of the author, to answer the questions. My recommendation would have been to approach this section at the very end of the paper to devote quite an amount of time to comprehend & answer the questions. Majority of the questions from Spotting Errors section came from the tense & Subject-Verb agreement errors, though the candidate had to have quite a careful eye to detect wrong usage of words in a couple of questions. Ordering of Words in a Sentence would have been an easier section to solve, while the Idioms & Phrases section needed an average knowledge of the candidate’s vocabulary & reading practice. Surprisingly, Ordering of Sentences was a piece of cake for those who knew to connect the dots easily & logically & certainly, for those who knew the shortcut tricks to answer this section! Fill in the Blanks questions needed a good knowledge of the use of certain noun & verb phrases, while the questions from Synonyms & Antonyms were easier to solve provided they were given in the form of sentences, which are quite easier to guess than single words! What changed the game this year were the questions from Parts of Speech & Transformation of Sentences sections. The pattern of the questions are quite different & harder than the previous years’. The Parts of Speech questions required a greater knowledge of what is what in English grammar & the Transformation of Sentences is needed framing & contracting different kinds of sentences into suitable ones. Spelling section asked the candidates to point out words with easy to average level of spelling mistakes which would have been a simple job for those who are in the reading habit. Questions from Reported Speech section followed the general pattern & standard level of difficulty & would be a scoring section for the candidates who practiced the question patterns well. Overall, the CDS 1 2020 paper on English was a hard nut to crack for it requires an expert level of knowledge & thorough conceptual understanding of Grammatical technicalities of the candidate to ace good marks in this paper.
| SECTIONS | No. of QUESTIONS |
| Comprehension | 2 Passages (5 each) |
| Spotting Errors | 10 |
| Ordering of Words in a Sentence | 10 |
| Idioms & Phrases | 10 |
| Ordering of Sentences | 10 |
| Fill in the Blanks | 10 |
| Synonyms | 10 |
| Antonyms | 10 |
| Parts of Speech | 10 |
| Spelling Mistakes | 10 |
| Transformation of Sentences | 10 |
| Reported Speech | 10 |
