Prepositions — Study Notes for Bihar TET

Overview

Prepositions are small but mighty words that establish relationships between nouns, pronouns, and other elements in a sentence. They indicate position, direction, time, manner, and various other connections. Despite their brevity, prepositions carry significant weight in Bihar TET Language II (English), appearing in fill-in-the-blanks, error spotting, and sentence correction questions.

Mastering prepositions is essential because even advanced learners make errors with them—there are few absolute rules, and usage often depends on convention rather than logic. Indian English speakers frequently transfer Hindi prepositional patterns into English, leading to common mistakes that examiners specifically target. A solid grip on the thirty to forty most common prepositions and their standard collocations will help you score consistently in this section.

The good news: preposition questions are predictable. Once you learn the patterns tested repeatedly—time prepositions, place prepositions, and fixed phrases with verbs/adjectives—you can answer these questions quickly and accurately.

Key Concepts

• **Definition**: A preposition is a word placed before a noun or pronoun to show its relationship with another word in the sentence. Example: The book is *on* the table.

• **Object of Preposition**: A preposition must have an object (noun/pronoun). "On" alone means nothing; "on the table" creates meaning. The object always takes the objective case (him, her, them—not he, she, they).

• **Prepositions of Time**: Use *at* for specific times (at 5 o'clock), *on* for days/dates (on Monday, on 15th August), and *in* for longer periods (in January, in 2024, in the morning).

• **Prepositions of Place**: Use *at* for specific points (at the bus stop), *on* for surfaces (on the wall), and *in* for enclosed spaces (in the room, in Bihar).

• **Prepositions of Movement**: *To* indicates direction toward (go to school), *into* indicates movement from outside to inside (jumped into the river), *onto* indicates movement to a surface (climbed onto the roof).

• **Prepositional Phrases**: Fixed combinations where the preposition cannot be changed—"depend on," "interested in," "afraid of." These must be memorised.

• **No Preposition Needed**: Certain verbs like *discuss*, *enter*, *reach*, *resemble*, *comprise* do not take prepositions. "Discuss about" is wrong; "discuss the topic" is correct.

• **Preposition at Sentence End**: In modern English, ending a sentence with a preposition is acceptable in informal contexts. "What are you looking for?" is correct.