Best Books for CLAT English Language Preparation

Candidates can refer to the below-mentioned books for CLAT English Langugage preparation:

• High School English Grammar and Composition by Wren & Martin
• Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis
• Objective General English by AP Bharadwaj
• Objective General English by RS Aggarwal

How to Attempt CLAT 2024 English Language Questions?

Every candidate might have their own specific approach planned to answer the CLAT English Language questions. However, candidates can refer to some of the tips mentioned below to attempt the English Language questions in the CLAT 2024 exam:

• Read the passage carefully the first time, and then just skim it again once.
• Each passage will mainly have one main argument that you need to identify. Find the passage's arguments and sentences in support of or against them.
• After skimming the passage for the second time, try to attempt the questions.
• Two types of Vocabulary questions are asked. In one type, the meaning of a particular word is asked, while the other type asks about the word's meaning in relation to the text. To attempt such questions, just read a few lines before and after the mentioned word as this will help you ascertain the meaning of any unfamiliar word.
• If a question is taking a long time to answer, just move on from it for the moment. After having completed the other questions, return to the question.

CLAT 2024 English Language Questions

Given below are English Language questions from the CLAT Question Paper of 2023 for your reference.
Passage 1: I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup…. Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. …. Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised. [Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

Ques: What use was the kabadiwala (wastepicker) to the author?

(A) The kabadiwala bought up all her magazines.
(B) The kabadiwala’s stock of books and magazines were of interest to the author.
(C) The kabadiwala was about to steal the author’s magazines.
(D) The author ordered books online which the kabadiwala delivered

Ques: What according to the author is essential about the experience of being a ‘provincial reader’?

(A) Belatedness in the sense of coming late for everything.
(B) Over-eagerness.
(C) Accepting a temporal gap between what was current in the wider world and the time at which these arrived in the provincial location.
(D) None of the above

Ques: Why did the author feel a sense of epiphany and deep sadness?

(A) Because the things that felt special and unique to the author, were already established and accepted thought in the wider world.
(B) Because the author was less well-read than others.
(C) Because the author missed being in a big city.
(D) All the above

Ques: What does the word ‘anachronistic’ as used in the passage, mean?

(A) Rooted in a non-urban setting
(B) Related to a mofussil area
(C) Connected with another time
(D) Opposed to prevailing sensibilities

Ques:. Which of the following options captures the meaning of the last sentence best?

(A) Though the author feels provincial, she pretends to be from the metropolis.
(B) Though the author feels dated in her access to intellectual ideas, her lack of metropolitan sophistication lets her engage with the ideas with some originality.
(C) Though the author is aware of the limitedness of her knowledge, she is confident and can hold her own in a crowd. She also proud of her roots in the small town.
(D) All the above

Passage 2: The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unliveable hell. The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. [Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 2019.]

Ques: Which of the following statements can be inferred from the above passage?

(A) The internet expanded very slowly
(B) The internet can be used to cause harm
(C) The internet is addictive
(D) The main purpose of social media platforms is to dissuade people from showing off

Ques: All the following statements are ‘truisms’, except:
(A) The internet has changed the way the world works.
(B) A preference for cat videos can reveal a lot about your personality.
(C) Like with any tool, digital technology has both advantages and disadvantages.
(D) Only time can tell what the future holds.

Ques: Which of the following comes closest to the underlined sentence in the passage?

(A) The way we use the internet says a lot about who we are.
(B) The internet has reduced the distance between people living across the world.
(C) The internet has the ability to customise what we access based on our identity.
(D) The internet only shows us what we don’t want to see.

Ques: Which of the following is a metaphor?

(A) the village of the internet
(B) this feverish, electric, unliveable hell
(C) three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success
(D) all the above

Ques: Which of the following categories best describes this piece of writing?

(A) Non-fiction essay
(B) Fiction
(C) Academic paper
(D) Poem