Vocabulary and Word Usage
What this section tests
Vocabulary items check breadth (knowing the word) and precision (knowing which word fits the context). Expect synonym and antonym questions, collocation items, word-form choices, and 'choose the best word' sentences.
Concepts to master
- Collocation: words that naturally combine (make a decision, heavy rain, highly likely).
- Register and connotation: cheap vs. affordable, childish vs. childlike.
- Word families: deciding among noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms.
- Prefixes and suffixes: un-, mis-, over-, -less, -able to infer unfamiliar words.
- Phrasal verbs: meaning shifts with the particle (give up, give in, give out).
Traps to expect
Near-synonyms with different collocations or formality. Options that are the right part of speech but wrong meaning. Words that look similar but differ (affect/effect, economic/economical). Answers that fit the sentence grammatically but sound unnatural to a fluent speaker.
Rule of thumb
When two options seem close, test each in a short phrase with a familiar partner word. If you cannot recall a word's meaning, use context and morphology (prefix + root + suffix) to narrow the field.
Worked example
"The company made a significant ___ in reducing waste." Options: improvement / progress / advance / breakthrough. Reasoning: make progress is the natural collocation; make an improvement is less idiomatic here, and breakthrough usually follows achieve or make with a different sense. Best fit: progress.