BPSC TRE 4.0: English Subject Paper, Pattern and Revision

The Examination and How It Is Built

TRE 4.0 is conducted by the Bihar Public Service Commission for teaching posts under the Education Department of the Government of Bihar. It is a single stage objective examination. According to the Commission's examination calendar the paper is scheduled tentatively between 22 and 27 September 2026, so confirm the final date and the detailed advertisement on the Commission's own website before making a study plan around it.

Eligibility rests on the academic qualification for the level applied for together with the relevant teacher eligibility test, and the final selection is made on the marks of the subject and general studies parts. The language part only has to be cleared.

• Total: 150 questions, 150 marks, 2 hours 30 minutes. One mark for a correct answer, one third of a mark deducted for a wrong answer.
• Classes 1 to 5, primary teacher: Part I Language 30 questions, Part II General Studies 120 questions.
• Classes 6 to 8, classes 9 to 10 and classes 11 to 12: Part I Language 30 questions, Part II General Studies 40 questions, Part III Concerned Subject 80 questions.
• Part I is qualifying only. A minimum of 30 per cent is required in it and its marks do not count towards the merit list. Check the notification for the exact language options offered for your post.
• The concerned subject part carries more than half the paper, so English is where the ranking is decided. Eighty questions at one mark each dwarf the forty general studies marks.
• For secondary posts the subject content is pitched at graduation level; for higher secondary posts it is pitched at postgraduate level, with questions grounded in the class 11 and class 12 syllabus but demanding degree level understanding.
• Negative marking of one third means that a wild guess is a losing bet. Attempt a question only when you can eliminate at least two options.

Part III English: The Literature Revision Map

Questions on English literature in these papers are overwhelmingly of three types: who wrote what, when did a movement happen, and which character or line belongs to which work. Revise by period and attach a handful of anchor facts to each.

• Old and Middle English: Beowulf as the earliest surviving English epic; Chaucer as the father of English poetry, with The Canterbury Tales and its General Prologue; Langland's Piers Plowman; Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur; the morality play Everyman.
• Renaissance and Elizabethan: Wyatt and Surrey introduce the sonnet into English; Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the Spenserian stanza; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine and Edward the Second; Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth; Ben Jonson's Volpone and The Alchemist; Bacon's essays; the King James Bible of 1611.
• Metaphysical and Puritan: Donne as head of the metaphysical school, with the conceit as his signature device; Herbert, Marvell and Vaughan; Milton's Paradise Lost, published in ten books in 1667 and in twelve in 1674, along with Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Lycidas and Areopagitica; Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.
• Restoration and eighteenth century: Dryden as the first Poet Laureate in the modern line and author of Absalom and Achitophel and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy; the comedy of manners in Congreve's The Way of the World; Pope's The Rape of the Lock and An Essay on Man; Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal; Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 and Boswell's Life of Johnson; the rise of the novel with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne; Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
• Romantic: the age is usually dated from Lyrical Ballads of 1798 to 1832; Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, The Prelude and the Preface of 1800; Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel; Byron's Don Juan and Childe Harold; Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Adonais and Prometheus Unbound; Keats's odes and Hyperion; the essayists Lamb and Hazlitt; Scott and Austen in the novel.
• Victorian: Tennyson as Poet Laureate, with In Memoriam, Ulysses and The Charge of the Light Brigade; Browning's dramatic monologues, My Last Duchess and Andrea del Sarto; Arnold's Dover Beach; Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot and Hardy in fiction; Ruskin, Carlyle and Newman in prose; Wilde and the aesthetic movement.
• Modern and after: Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Hopkins in poetry, with The Waste Land of 1922 as the landmark; Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf in fiction; Shaw's problem plays; Osborne's Look Back in Anger of 1956; Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Golding, Orwell and Greene.
• Indian writing in English: Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo and Tagore, whose Gitanjali brought the Nobel Prize in 1913; the trio of Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao; Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das and A. K. Ramanujan in poetry; Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh in later fiction.
• American literature, which often supplies a few questions: Emerson and Thoreau and transcendentalism; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson; Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; Melville's Moby Dick; Mark Twain; Frost; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Language, Grammar and Usage

The English language questions in both the qualifying part and the subject part are predictable, and a short list of rules covers most of them. Practise them as sets rather than reading grammar prose.

• Parts of speech, tense and aspect, active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech, degrees of comparison and question tags.
• Subject and verb agreement, including collective nouns, either and neither constructions, and phrases such as one of the boys who, where the verb follows the plural relative.
• Articles, prepositions and the common phrasal verbs, which are among the most frequently set items.
• Conditionals and the subjunctive, including the pattern if I were and the use of would rather and had better.
• Transformation of sentences: simple, compound and complex; affirmative to negative; assertive to interrogative; and the rules for degree transformation.
• Vocabulary: synonyms, antonyms, one word substitution, idioms and phrases, homophones, and words commonly confused such as principal and principle or stationary and stationery.
• Phonetics at a basic level: vowels and consonants, the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds, syllables and word stress.
• Figures of speech, since these bridge the language and the literature sections: simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, hyperbole, oxymoron, paradox, irony, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, metonymy and synecdoche.

General Studies and Teaching Method

Forty general studies questions are worth half of the subject section, and they are far cheaper to prepare because the ground is familiar. The Bihar-specific material in particular repays a few focused hours because it is finite and it recurs.

• Indian history with attention to Bihar: Magadha, the Mauryan and Gupta empires, Nalanda and Vikramshila, the 1857 revolt in Bihar, the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917, and the Quit India movement.
• Geography of India and of Bihar: rivers, the flood-prone north Bihar plain, districts, agriculture and industries.
• Indian polity: the Constitution, fundamental rights and duties, the directive principles, Parliament, the state legislature and panchayati raj, along with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009.
• Economy, general science and reasoning at a general level, plus current affairs of national and state importance.
• Where teaching method questions appear, revise the National Education Policy of 2020, the National Curriculum Framework, child-centred and activity-based learning, continuous and comprehensive evaluation, and the basics of language teaching method, that is the grammar translation, direct, audio-lingual and communicative approaches.
• Strategy in the hall: clear the language part first and quickly, then give the bulk of the time to the eighty subject questions, and treat general studies as the section to finish fast so that the subject part gets a second pass.

Key Terms

Qualifying paper

A section that a candidate must clear at a stated minimum, here 30 per cent in the language part, but whose marks are not added to the score used to prepare the merit list.

Metaphysical conceit

An extended and deliberately far-fetched comparison between two very unlike things, worked out in detail through logic and learning. Donne's comparison of two lovers to the legs of a pair of compasses is the standard example.

Dramatic monologue

A poem in which a single speaker, who is not the poet, addresses a silent listener at a decisive moment and reveals character unintentionally. Browning's My Last Duchess is the classic instance.

One word substitution

A recurring question type in which a phrase is replaced by a single precise word, for example a person who cannot read or write is illiterate, and the study of birds is ornithology.

Practice Quiz — 20 Questions

1. In BPSC TRE 4.0 for classes 9 to 10 and 11 to 12, how many questions come from the concerned subject?

   • A.40
   • B.60
   • C.80
   • D.120
   C. 80 — The pattern is 30 language, 40 general studies and 80 concerned subject, making 150 questions in all.

2. The negative marking in BPSC TRE 4.0 is:

   • A.No negative marking
   • B.One quarter of a mark for a wrong answer
   • C.One third of a mark for a wrong answer
   • D.Half a mark for a wrong answer
   C. One third of a mark for a wrong answer — One third of a mark is deducted for each wrong answer, so guessing without elimination is costly.

3. Which part of the TRE 4.0 paper is qualifying only, with its marks not counted in the merit list?

   • A.General Studies
   • B.Language
   • C.Concerned Subject
   • D.None of these
   B. Language — The 30 question language part must be cleared at a minimum of 30 per cent but does not add to the merit score.

4. Paradise Lost was first published in 1667 in how many books?

   • A.Eight
   • B.Ten
   • C.Twelve
   • D.Twenty four
   B. Ten — The first edition of 1667 had ten books. Milton rearranged it into twelve books for the edition of 1674.

5. Who is usually called the father of English poetry?

   • A.John Gower
   • B.Geoffrey Chaucer
   • C.William Langland
   • D.Edmund Spenser
   B. Geoffrey Chaucer — Chaucer earned the title for establishing English as a literary language, above all in The Canterbury Tales.

6. The Rape of the Lock is a mock-epic by:

   • A.John Dryden
   • B.Jonathan Swift
   • C.Alexander Pope
   • D.Samuel Johnson
   C. Alexander Pope — Pope's poem treats the cutting of a lock of Belinda's hair in the grand manner of epic.

7. The Romantic age in English literature is conventionally dated from the publication of:

   • A.Lyrical Ballads in 1798
   • B.The Prelude in 1850
   • C.The Deserted Village in 1770
   • D.Songs of Innocence in 1789
   A. Lyrical Ballads in 1798 — Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 is the usual starting point, with the critical Preface added in 1800.

8. My Last Duchess, a dramatic monologue spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, is by:

   • A.Alfred Tennyson
   • B.Robert Browning
   • C.Matthew Arnold
   • D.Dante Gabriel Rossetti
   B. Robert Browning — It is Browning's best known dramatic monologue, from Dramatic Lyrics of 1842.

9. Which novel opens the career of R. K. Narayan's fictional town of Malgudi?

   • A.The Guide
   • B.Swami and Friends
   • C.The Bachelor of Arts
   • D.The English Teacher
   B. Swami and Friends — Swami and Friends of 1935 is the first of the Malgudi novels.

10. Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 chiefly for:

    • A.Gora
    • B.Gitanjali
    • C.The Home and the World
    • D.Chitra
    B. Gitanjali — The award followed the English Gitanjali, or Song Offerings, published in 1912.

11. Look Back in Anger, the play that gave rise to the phrase Angry Young Men, was written by:

    • A.Harold Pinter
    • B.John Osborne
    • C.Arnold Wesker
    • D.Samuel Beckett
    B. John Osborne — John Osborne's play was first staged in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre.

12. The comparison of two lovers to the legs of a pair of compasses appears in a poem by:

    • A.George Herbert
    • B.John Donne
    • C.Andrew Marvell
    • D.Henry Vaughan
    B. John Donne — It is the famous conceit at the close of Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.

13. Choose the correct sentence.

    • A.One of the boys have finished the work.
    • B.One of the boys has finished the work.
    • C.One of the boy has finished the work.
    • D.One of the boys are finishing the work.
    B. One of the boys has finished the work. — The subject is one, which is singular, so the verb is has. The plural boys belongs to the prepositional phrase.

14. Choose the correct passive form of: They are building a new school.

    • A.A new school is being built by them.
    • B.A new school is built by them.
    • C.A new school has been built by them.
    • D.A new school was being built by them.
    A. A new school is being built by them. — The present continuous active becomes is or are being plus the past participle in the passive.

15. If I ____ you, I would accept the offer. Choose the correct form.

    • A.am
    • B.was
    • C.were
    • D.will be
    C. were — An unreal condition in the present takes the subjunctive were for all persons.

16. The figure of speech in the line the child is father of the man is:

    • A.Simile
    • B.Paradox
    • C.Metonymy
    • D.Hyperbole
    B. Paradox — Wordsworth's line is a paradox, a statement that seems self-contradictory but carries a truth.

17. One word substitution: a person who does not believe in the existence of God is:

    • A.Agnostic
    • B.Atheist
    • C.Heretic
    • D.Sceptic
    B. Atheist — An atheist denies the existence of God, while an agnostic holds that it cannot be known.

18. Choose the correct pair: the study of the origin and history of words is:

    • A.Etymology
    • B.Entomology
    • C.Ethnology
    • D.Epistemology
    A. Etymology — Etymology studies word origins. Entomology is the study of insects and ethnology the study of peoples.

19. The Champaran Satyagraha, led by Gandhi in Bihar, took place in:

    • A.1915
    • B.1917
    • C.1919
    • D.1922
    B. 1917 — Gandhi's first satyagraha in India was at Champaran in 1917, on behalf of indigo cultivators.

20. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, frequently tested in teacher recruitment papers, was enacted in:

    • A.2002
    • B.2005
    • C.2009
    • D.2012
    C. 2009 — The Act was passed in 2009 and came into force on 1 April 2010, giving effect to Article 21A of the Constitution.

References

• Bihar Public Service Commission, official website and examination calendar — https://www.bpsc.bihar.gov.in/
• BPSC TRE 4.0 syllabus and exam pattern — https://www.pw.live/teaching/exams/bpsc-tre-4-0-syllabus
• BPSC TRE 4.0 syllabus, detailed pattern and marks distribution — https://www.adda247.com/teaching-jobs-exam/bihar-teacher-syllabus/
• NCERT textbooks for classes 11 and 12, English — https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php
• The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 — https://www.education.gov.in/rte