Word formation: five roots, five traps
The use-of-English section includes a short text with five gaps. Each gap requires one word formed from the root in capitals, written in the gap; two words in one gap score zero, and spelling errors score zero. The candidate's answers are shown in brackets.
The ___ (DECIDE) to close the plant was ___ (SURPRISE) to the workforce. Although the site had been ___ (PROFIT) for years, the ___ (ECONOMY) situation made new investment impossible, and management described the closure as ___ (AVOID).
Candidate: [deciding] [surprised] [profitable] [economical] [unavoidable]. He explains his choices: he wrote 'deciding' because it ends like a noun, 'surprised' because 'the workforce was surprised', and 'economical' because 'it looks more like economy'. He is confident about the last two.
1. Mark the five answers and give the correct form for each gap, explaining the syntactic or semantic reason for every correction.
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1. DECIDE → 'deciding': 0. Correct: 'decision'. The gap is preceded by 'The' and followed by 'to close', and it is the subject of 'was'. A noun is needed, and 'deciding' as a gerund would normally take an object without 'the'. 'The decision to close' is the fixed pattern.
2. SURPRISE → 'surprised': 0. Correct: 'surprising'. 'Surprising to the workforce' means it caused surprise. 'Surprised to the workforce' would mean the workforce felt surprise, which requires 'the workforce was surprised by'. The -ed form describes the experiencer, the -ing form describes the cause.
3. PROFIT → 'profitable': 1. Adjective after 'had been', meaning 'making a profit'. Correct.
4. ECONOMY → 'economical': 0. Correct: 'economic'. 'Economic situation' means the situation of the economy. 'Economical' means money-saving, and a money-saving situation is not what the sentence says.
5. AVOID → 'unavoidable': 1. Correct: 'un-' + 'avoid' + '-able', adjective after 'described the closure as'. Note the spelling: no e is lost.
2. The candidate's 'economical' is grammatically well formed. Explain what kind of error this is and why the gap still scores zero.
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It is a lexical-collocation error, not a morphological one. The suffix is right, the spelling is right, the word class is right-only the meaning is wrong, and meaning is part of the mark.
'Economic' relates to the economy as a system: economic growth, economic policy, the economic situation. 'Economical' relates to thrift: an economical car, an economical use of time. The test is substitution: 'the money-saving situation made new investment impossible' is nonsensical, so 'economical' cannot stand.
The candidate's stated method-choosing by resemblance to the root-is the general fault. Word formation gaps are solved in two moves: first identify the word class from the slot (article + noun; 'had been' + adjective; 'described X as' + adjective), then choose the suffix that fits that class and the meaning. Only after both checks should the candidate look at the root.
Exam habit worth building: the near-miss pair. Whenever a text yields 'economic', expect 'economical'; whenever it yields 'sensible', expect 'sensitive'; 'historic/historical', 'industrious/industrial'. Examiners select roots for exactly this reason.
3. Gap 2 is the item where a correct-looking answer is most often lost. Formulate a general rule the candidate can apply to all -ed/-ing adjective gaps, and illustrate it with one contrast drawn from the same text.
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Rule: an -ed adjective describes the person or thing that experiences the feeling; an -ing adjective describes the person or thing that produces it. Ask 'who feels it?' and 'what causes it?'.
Here, the decision is the cause and the workforce is the experiencer: 'The decision was surprising to the workforce' / 'The workforce was surprised by the decision'. The candidate's 'surprised to the workforce' attaches the experiencer form to the wrong noun.
The same contrast appears in gap 5. 'Unavoidable' describes the closure-the thing that cannot be avoided-which is correct, because the closure is the object of avoidance, not the avoider. Had the sentence read 'Management felt ___ (AVOID) about the closure' the answer would be 'unavoidably'? No: it would be 'uneasy', since 'avoid' has no -ed adjective for feelings. That is the second lesson: the -ed/-ing rule applies only to verbs of emotion and perception, so check that the root is one before applying it.
Practical check in ten seconds: read the sentence aloud with 'by' and 'to' inserted. If 'surprised by the workforce' seems wrong and 'surprising to the workforce' seems right, the -ing form is the one.