IBPS PO Exam 2015: English Language- Syllabus and Preparation Tips

Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) which is the recruitment agency for selecting and appointing clerical grade and officer grade candidates in various participating nationalized banks around the country. Like every year IBPS has declared notification for Probationary officer recruitment for this year. The PO examinations are conducted in two rounds namely Preliminary and Mains. The candidates would need to first go through prelims exams successfully to get qualified for mains examination. Qualifying the mains examination would land up the candidates to personal interview round, clearing which the candidates would get placed in officer posts in participating nationalized banks. The prelims and examination for this year PO post is in October 2015 for which the candidates need to gear up from now.

Every year lakhs of aspiring participants apply for these posts and with each passing year the competition is growing severe. Hence the candidates need to prepare themselves beforehand in order to make themselves ready for the fierce competition and secure a berth for themselves. The prelims and main examination contains 3 and 5 papers respectively. English Language, Quantitative Aptitude and Reasoning are common papers in both the exams. The mains exam contains two more papers namely General Awareness (with special reference to Banking Industry) and Computer Knowledge. The level of questions and difficulty differs in both the exams and thus needs adequate preparation before going for it. The prelims examination is of 100 marks giving 1 hour to the candidates whereas the Mains examination contains 200 marks along with 2 hours’ time. The questions of each of the papers would be bilingual (except English) for the candidates.

Syllabus for English Language: Although IBPS does not provide syllabus, Jagranjosh has come up with topics to be prepared for IBPS PO Exam 2015.

The topics list: This part covers following topics:-

Vocabulary:
• Homonyms
• Antonyms
• Synonyms
• Word Formation
• Spelling

Grammar:
• Spotting Errors
• Phrases and idioms
• Direct and Indirect speech
• Active/ Passive voice

Reading Comprehension:
• Theme Detection
• Passage completion
• Topic rearrangement of passage
• Deriving Conclusion

Tips and Strategies:
• Know your syllabus first: It is the first and foremost part for the candidates to know the syllabus well before starting to prepare. After going through the syllabus the candidates would come to know what exactly they need to study and they can immediately analyze their strong and weaker sections, so that they can work on those areas to make their preparation perfect. It also gives proper starting for the preparing candidates to launch effectively.
• Strengthen your reading comprehension skills: Reading is very important in this examination. Though the questions are all objective and doesn’t require descriptive details to solve, it is required to have a good go with the language in order to solve the reading comprehension and passage part of the paper. It is very important to have a habit of reading and understanding from typical and tough sentences. Candidates need to practice such questions everyday so that they can prepare themselves on how to find answers among the passages.
• Make yourself grammatically sound: If you have had any issues with you grammar skills in your secondary level studies, do get back to the basics and prepare yourself thoroughly. The entire paper depends on good sense of grammar and its various contours. Candidates would need to answer questions dealing with basic grammar skills and questions pertaining to forms of verbs, adjectives, parts of speech, direct and indirect sentences, active and passive voices etc.
• Hunt for new words: Strengthening your vocabulary is a very important task while preparing for the paper. There are literally thousands of words with specific meanings which doesn’t seem practical to remember by heart. Hence the candidates need to make the list of words that they see recur quite a many times during their preparation, make a list of it and remember them. This helps in solving questions pertaining to synonyms, antonyms, one word substitutions, questions related to idioms and phrases and many more.