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GATE verbal ability: 5 practice questions with answers

By the PrepMatic team · Updated 9 Oct 2026 · 4 min read

General Aptitude (GA) is the one section common to every GATE paper: 10 questions for 15 marks, which means five 1-mark and five 2-mark questions. Verbal ability is the part of GA you can improve fastest, because it rewards vocabulary and reading habits rather than mathematics. The five questions below are original GATE-style practice questions, not past-paper questions.

What verbal ability covers in GATE

The GATE 2027 syllabus lists four verbal skills: grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension and narrative sequencing. In practice they turn up as five question shapes:

• Sentence completion with one or two blanks, tested through context clues.
• Word meaning, antonyms and correct usage.
• Choosing the grammatically correct sentence (agreement, tense, articles, prepositions).
• Ordering jumbled sentences into a coherent paragraph.
• A short passage followed by a question that asks what can be inferred.

The full list is on the official GATE 2027 syllabus page, and the GATE general aptitude guide shows how GA fits into the 100-mark paper. Here every question is an MCQ. In the real paper a wrong MCQ answer costs 1/3 mark on a 1-mark question and 2/3 mark on a 2-mark question, so eliminate options before you guess.

Practice questions

Question 1

The committee's report was so ______ that even experts found it hard to extract a clear recommendation from it.

• A. lucid
• B. concise
• C. emphatic
• D. convoluted

Question 2

Which one of the following sentences is grammatically correct?

• A. Neither the manager nor the engineers was informed of the change.
• B. Neither the manager nor the engineers were informed of the change.
• C. Neither the manager nor the engineers has been informed of the change.
• D. Neither the manager nor the engineer were informed of the change.

Question 3

The four sentences below are jumbled. Choose the order that forms a coherent paragraph.

• P. As a result, the village now sells its produce directly to the city market.
• Q. A cooperative was formed by the farmers in 2015.
• R. For years, the farmers had depended on middlemen who paid low prices.
• S. The cooperative then bought a refrigerated truck.

Which sequence is correct?

• A. RQSP
• B. QRSP
• C. RSQP
• D. QSRP

Question 4

Urban planners often assume that wider roads reduce congestion. Studies of several cities, however, show that new road capacity tends to attract additional vehicles until congestion returns to its earlier level. The effect is strongest where public transport is weak.

Which one of the following can be inferred from the passage?

• A. Widening a road never reduces travel time, even for a short period.
• B. Planners should stop building roads altogether.
• C. Good public transport always eliminates congestion.
• D. Where public transport is strong, added road capacity is less likely to be fully absorbed by new traffic.

Question 5

Choose the word that is most nearly opposite in meaning to ostentatious.

• A. flamboyant
• B. lavish
• C. modest
• D. conspicuous

Answers and explanations

1. D. The blank must describe a report from which a recommendation is hard to extract. "Convoluted" (twisted, hard to follow) fits. "Lucid" and "concise" would make the report easy to follow, and "emphatic" says nothing about clarity.
2. B. With "neither … nor", the verb agrees with the subject nearer to it. Here that is "engineers", which is plural, so "were" is right. Options A and C use singular verbs with a plural nearest subject. Option D pairs the singular "engineer" with "were".
3. A (R Q S P). R sets the background (farmers depended on middlemen). Q is the cooperative being formed, S is what it did next, and P ("As a result") gives the outcome, so P must come last. Starting with Q leaves "the farmers" in R without context.
4. D. The passage says the effect is strongest where public transport is weak, so it is weaker where public transport is strong. A is too absolute ("never"), B is a policy claim the passage does not make, and C overstates ("always eliminates").
5. C. "Ostentatious" means showy, designed to impress. "Modest" is the opposite. The other three are synonyms or near-synonyms.

How to prepare verbal ability

• Read one editorial a day and underline words you could not define. Keep a notebook of 5 to 10 new words a week, each with a sentence of your own.
• Learn the grammar rules that decide most error questions: subject-verb agreement (including "neither … nor" and "each of"), tense consistency, articles, prepositions, parallel structure and pronoun reference.
• For sentence ordering, find the opening and closing sentences first. The opener introduces a topic without referring back. The closer usually contains "so", "thus" or "as a result".
• For comprehension, answer only from the passage. Options with words like "always", "never" or "only" are often traps, as in Question 4.
• Time-box it. Spend about a minute per question. If a blank is not clicking, eliminate two options and move on.

Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is enough if you keep it daily from the start rather than saving it for the last month. Cover the other GA skills with the quantitative and analytical practice pages.

Take the full topic test on PrepMatic

These five questions are only a sample. PrepMatic's topic tests run about 15 questions in 30 minutes, and its free assessment shows your weakest subjects, so you know whether verbal or the maths-heavy parts of GA need more of your time.

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