Introduction
In every competitive exam in Bangladesh — BCS (Preliminary and Written), Bank (Combined/Bangladesh Bank/Sonali/Rupali), and IT-officer posts — the English Language section reliably carries 3 to 8 marks on idioms, phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases and proverbs. These items are pure vocabulary-plus-meaning questions: they cannot be reasoned out from grammar rules, so they reward the candidate who has genuinely learned a stock of fixed expressions and understood how each behaves.
This lesson builds the topic from first principles. You will learn what an idiom, a phrase and a proverb actually are (they are three different things, and exams test them differently), how their meaning works (figurative vs. literal), and which high-frequency items recur in Bangladeshi question papers. We finish with worked examples, comparison tables, practice sets with solutions, exam tips and the classic traps.
Learning objectives
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
- Define and distinguish idiom, phrase, phrasal verb, prepositional phrase and proverb, and say why each is a separate exam category.
- Explain the idea of figurative (non-compositional) meaning — why "kick the bucket" has nothing to do with buckets.
- Recognise and reproduce the high-frequency idioms and phrases that repeat across BCS, Bank and IT papers.
- Handle the four common question formats: choose-the-meaning, fill-in-the-preposition, choose-the-correct-phrasal-verb, and match/complete-the-proverb.
- Avoid the standard traps: literal decoys, wrong prepositions, and confusably similar idioms.
- Apply a reliable strategy to guess safely when you do not know an item.