Sentence Improvement

You are shown a sentence with one part underlined and four replacements. Your job is to find one defect and repair it with the least change.

Four defects account for nearly all of these questions:

1. Redundancy. return back, repeat again, revert back, cousin brother, more better, discuss about, ascend up, join together — each says the same thing twice. Delete the extra word.
2. Wrong preposition or fixed phrase. married with → married to, angry on → angry with, comprises of → comprises, different than → different from.
3. Grammar proper. Subject–verb agreement, tense sequence, wrong verb form after did/have/modal, pronoun case, wrong article.
4. Word order and parallelism. A list must keep one shape: "He likes reading, writing and to paint" must become "…and painting."

The single most common mistake in strategy, not grammar, is choosing the longest and most impressive option. The examiner builds one option that is correct and two that are merely more elaborate. Pick the shortest replacement that removes the defect and changes nothing else, and remember that "No improvement" is a genuine answer that is correct roughly one time in five.

How to spot the defect fast: read only the underlined part first and ask whether it can stand alone as correct English. If it can, look hard at the rest of the sentence before concluding there is an error at all.

One defect only · delete redundancy (return back, repeat again, more better, discuss about) · fix the fixed phrase (married to, angry with, different from) · keep a list parallel · choose the shortest correct option; "No improvement" is a real answer

Improve the underlined part: "He returned back from Pune yesterday." Options: (a) returned back (b) returned (c) was returned back (d) had returned back. → (b) returned. The word "return" already contains the idea of coming back, so "back" is redundant; nothing else in the sentence is wrong. Sanity check: options (c) and (d) change the tense and the voice as well, which is more repair than the sentence needs — the smallest fix that removes the defect is the right one.