Vocabulary and Usage: Countability and Phrasal-Verb Meaning in the Last Four Minutes
Ryo is on item 9 of a ten-item vocabulary section with four minutes left. He decides by asking which option 'sounds natural' and by translating the sentence into Japanese.
Item 9: 'The museum has received ___ of paintings from a private collector.' A) a large number B) a great deal C) a large amount D) much
Item 10: 'The two countries agreed to ___ their differences and resume talks.' A) put aside B) put off C) put up with D) put down
On item 9 he hesitates between A and B: both are formal, and he half-remembers a rule about 'amount' and 'number' but cannot recall which noun type goes with which. On item 10 he chooses B, because 'put off' is the phrasal verb he has met most often in textbooks, and his literal gloss 違いを延期する does not strike him as strange. He plans to leave both items blank if he is still unsure, on the grounds that blanks cannot be marked wrong.
1. Resolve item 9 and explain why Ryo's 'sounds natural' test failed.
Read the worked answer
Answer: A - a large number of paintings.
- The deciding feature is the countability of the noun, not the formality of the phrase. 'Paintings' is a plural count noun; English quantifies count nouns with number ('a large number of paintings', 'many paintings', 'few paintings') and uncountable nouns with amount/deal ('a large amount of money', 'a great deal of information').
- Substitution test: put a clearly uncountable noun after each phrase. 'A great deal of information' ✓; 'a great deal of paintings' ✗. Then put a plural count noun: 'a large number of paintings' ✓; 'a large amount of paintings' ✗ in exam written standard (heard informally, but not accepted on a test).
- 'Much' is excluded twice: it takes uncountable nouns and it is unusual in affirmative statements.
- His 'sounds natural' test failed because both A and B are bookish, formal phrases; register cannot separate them. Only the noun can.
Watch out: with 'a large number of + plural noun' the verb is plural ('A large number of paintings were donated'), whereas 'the number of paintings was small' is singular.
2. Resolve item 10 and explain why the most familiar option is the wrong one.
Read the worked answer
Answer: A - put aside.
- Meaning check by paraphrase: put off = postpone. Substitute it: 'agreed to postpone their differences'. Differences are not scheduled events, so the paraphrase is incoherent. His gloss 違いを延期する is odd for the same reason: he translated the phrasal verb in isolation instead of the whole predicate 'put off their differences'.
- The second half of the sentence sets the logic: 'and resume talks' presupposes that talks were suspended by a disagreement, so the first action must remove that obstacle. Put aside = set aside temporarily, the standard collocation with differences and disagreements.
- Put up with = tolerate: 'agreed to tolerate their differences and resume talks' is grammatical but describes enduring an annoyance, not clearing the way for talks. Put down = suppress or criticise, which contradicts 'agreed'.
- Familiarity bias: 'put off' is the most frequent of the four in textbooks, which is why it surfaced first. Frequency is not meaning.
Blank strategy: if the paper carries no penalty for wrong answers, never leave a blank - after eliminating B and D the guess is 50%, and a blank is 0%.
3. Which of Ryo's two habits actually helps, and where does each one break down?
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Translation into Japanese
- Helps with phrasal verbs only if he translates the full predicate with its object. Had he glossed 'put off their differences' as a unit, 違いを延期する would have exposed the mismatch immediately.
- Cannot help with quantifier countability. Japanese 絵画 has no singular/plural contrast, and 大量/多数 are not constrained the way amount/number are, so a translation-based check has no signal to give.
'Sounds natural'
- Works for collocation and for gross grammatical misfits, which is why it eliminates C and D on item 10 quickly.
- Fails whenever the options belong to the same register and the same part of speech, as on item 9. Near-synonyms of equal formality are exactly the case where the test is silent.
Practical rule: use the naturalness test for elimination, then apply a grammatical feature check (countability, transitivity, complement pattern) or a whole-predicate paraphrase to decide between the last two. Emotional confidence is not a tiebreaker.