Wizder has curated 500 multiple-choice questions from 14 O/L Sinhala past papers (Paper I, 2012 to 2025), each one tagged with the kind of thing it asks: a word meaning, an idiom, a proverb, a grammar rule, a comprehension question. Then we counted how many different sittings each type appears in. For Science that count was a warning against topic lists. For Sinhala it is the opposite.
The headline: 8 question types have appeared in every paper since 2012
Across 14 sittings the questions carry only 38 distinct type tags. 8 of them appear in all 14 papers, and those alone make up about 44% of every question we have. Widen it to types that appear in 12 or more sittings and you cover 16 types and about 77% of the paper. Only 6 tags are one-offs.
In plain terms: the Sinhala Paper I is a fixed menu. The passage changes, the words change, the proverb changes, but the kinds of question do not. That makes it the one O/L paper where doing every past paper genuinely prepares you for the next one.
The newest sittings in that count each have their own page: the 2025 O/L Sinhala paper, the 2024 paper and the 2023 paper. Every other sitting is listed on the O/L Sinhala past papers page.
The types that appear every year
- වචනාර්ථ (57 questions across 14 papers)
- රූඪි ව්‍යවහාර (35 questions across 14 papers)
- ප්‍රස්තාව පිරුළු (32 questions across 14 papers)
- නාම ආඛ්‍යාත ගැළපීම (26 questions across 14 papers)
- ඡේද අවබෝධය (20 questions across 14 papers)
- සමාස (15 questions across 14 papers)
- අකාරාදි පිළිවෙළ (14 questions across 14 papers)
- විරුද්ධ පද (14 questions across 14 papers)
The full top fifteen
Ranked by sittings covered, then by total questions.
| # | Question type | Years it appeared in | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | වචනාර්ථ | 14 of 14 | 57 |
| 2 | රූඪි ව්‍යවහාර | 14 of 14 | 35 |
| 3 | ප්‍රස්තාව පිරුළු | 14 of 14 | 32 |
| 4 | නාම ආඛ්‍යාත ගැළපීම | 14 of 14 | 26 |
| 5 | ඡේද අවබෝධය | 14 of 14 | 20 |
| 6 | සමාස | 14 of 14 | 15 |
| 7 | අකාරාදි පිළිවෙළ | 14 of 14 | 14 |
| 8 | විරුද්ධ පද | 14 of 14 | 14 |
| 9 | පද භාවිතය | 13 of 14 | 38 |
| 10 | පර්යාය පද | 13 of 14 | 21 |
| 11 | අලංකාර | 13 of 14 | 16 |
| 12 | සාහිත්‍ය ඉතිහාසය | 12 of 14 | 25 |
| 13 | ව්‍යාකරණ ප්‍රවර්ග | 12 of 14 | 23 |
| 14 | ක්‍රියා පද | 12 of 14 | 14 |
| 15 | උක්ත අනුක්ත නාම පද | 12 of 14 | 13 |
How to use this
- Practise by type, not by textbook chapter. Do every idiom question from every year in one go, then every proverb, then every subject-and-verb agreement question. Ten of the same type in a row teaches the pattern faster than one paper end to end.
- Keep a list of the words, idioms and proverbs you did not know. On this paper vocabulary is the biggest single type, and it is the one that rewards a personal list most.
- Save the full timed papers for the last month. Once the types are familiar, a paper is forty short decisions, and speed is what is left to practise.
Method, so you can argue with it
One tag per question, assigned during curation and checked against the marking scheme alongside the answer. Tags name the skill being tested, not the passage or the poem it is tested on, which is why the list is short and the repetition is high. Option spelling is kept exactly as the paper printed it, because on this paper a spelling is sometimes the question. Paper II is not included: essays, letters and literature answers are not multiple choice, and this count is about Paper I.
One of them, in full
“සේවකයෝ රාජකාරි නිමා කර කාර්යාලයෙන් පිටත් වූහ.” යන වාක්‍යයෙහි ‘කාර්යාලයෙන්’ යන්නෙහි විභක්තිය කුමක් ද?
- Aඅවධි
- Bආධාර
- Cසම්ප්‍රදාන
- Dකර්ම