Read regularly, and not only question banks
Reading is what improves comprehension and vocabulary together. Read good material regularly and pay attention to how ideas are constructed, not just what they say.
Practise comprehension deliberately
After reading a passage, identify its main idea, its supporting ideas, its tone, its purpose, and the conclusions it reaches. Those are the things comprehension questions test.
Build vocabulary in context
Learn words where they live — in sentences. A word learned from a list is easy to recognise and hard to use; a word learned in context is both.
Fix recurring grammar errors
Track the mistakes you keep making rather than treating each wrong answer as a one-off. A handful of rules usually accounts for most lost marks.
Review questions for the rule, not the option
When you get one wrong, find the underlying rule. That is the thing that transfers to the next question — the specific option never appears again.
Know the question types before you meet them
Use of English asks a limited set of recurring question shapes, and each rewards a slightly different approach. Being able to recognise which one you are looking at, within a second or two, is itself worth marks under time pressure:
- Nearest in meaning — predict a synonym yourself before reading the options.
- Opposite in meaning — check you are reversing the sense used in the sentence, not the word in isolation.
- Sentence interpretation — restate the sentence in plain language first.
- Comprehension — locate the supporting line rather than trusting memory of the passage.
- Stress and intonation — these follow rules you can revise; they are not guesswork.
Where the marks concentrate
With 60 questions, Use of English carries more weight than any single other subject in your combination. A candidate who is strong in their three chosen subjects but neglects Use of English is capping their own total. If you are budgeting revision time, it deserves a proportionate share.
Read something difficult on purpose
Comprehension passages are not written in casual language. Reading editorials, feature articles and formal writing trains you for the register you will actually meet, in a way that reading only practice questions does not.
Vocabulary learned inside a real sentence is vocabulary you can use. Vocabulary learned from a list is vocabulary you can only recognise — and UTME often asks you to do more than recognise.