Vocabulary: Near-Synonyms, Collocation and Register in a Newsletter
Mei is editing the English page of her school's international-club newsletter, which goes to students, teachers and visiting parents. She has four sentences to complete with one word each and a thesaurus open beside her. (a) 'The club ___ the budget proposal because it did not explain the transport costs.' - rejected / refused / declined / denied. (b) 'The new timetable will ___ every second-year student.' - affect / effect. (c) 'The trip was cancelled for ___ reasons.' - economic / economical. (d) 'Could you ___ me your dictionary until Friday?' - borrow / lend. She also wants to replace 'rejected' with 'turned down' because it sounds friendlier, and she wonders whether 'The committee made a decision' can become 'The committee did a decision' so that 'make' does not repeat a word from the previous sentence.
1. Choose the correct word for each of (a)-(d) and justify each choice with grammar, collocation or meaning.
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(a) rejected. 'Reject' takes a thing as its object - reject a proposal, a plan, an application - which is exactly the frame here. 'Refused' needs a to-infinitive ('refused to accept the proposal'); 'declined' suits an offer or invitation, or 'declined to do'; 'denied' means declaring something untrue and would reverse the meaning. (b) affect, the verb meaning to influence. 'Effect' is normally a noun meaning result; the verb 'to effect a change' exists but is formal and rare, and 'will effect every student' would be wrong here. (c) economic, meaning relating to money and the economy. 'Economical' means money-saving or thrifty; 'for economical reasons' would suggest the reasons themselves were cheap rather than financial. (d) lend, because the giver lends to the receiver; 'borrow me your dictionary' is a common error, since 'borrow' means take from someone. The method worth copying: test the grammatical pattern each verb requires - object type, to-infinitive, preposition - before comparing meanings, because half of these distractors are eliminated by syntax alone.
2. Is Mei right to replace 'rejected' with 'turned down'? Discuss in terms of register and precision.
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'Turned down' is grammatical and friendly, and it would be fine in a message between club members, so it is not an error. But two things make it weaker here. First, register: it is a phrasal verb and slightly informal, while the rest of the page - a newsletter read by teachers and visiting parents - is semi-formal; a single chatty phrasal verb can make the page feel inconsistent. Second, precision: 'rejected the proposal' reports an official decision, whereas 'turned down' can sound like a personal refusal or a casual no. In a report of a committee's decision, the neutral single verb is safer. Register questions in this exam usually turn on three tests: how formal the whole text is, whether a phrasal verb is replacing a single verb that already exists, and whether the substitute loses precision. If the same sentence appeared in a text message to a friend, 'turned down' would be the better choice.
3. Explain why 'did a decision' fails, and give two ways to avoid repeating 'made'.
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'Did a decision' is not English: 'decision' collocates with make, take (common in British usage), reach and arrive at, while 'do' collocates with tasks, homework, damage and favours. This is a collocation error rather than a meaning error - the sentence would be understood, which is precisely why examiners test it. Repetition is easily solved without breaking the collocation: 'The committee reached a decision' keeps the noun and changes the verb, or 'The committee decided' removes the noun altogether and is shorter and stronger. Prefer the second when the page is short, because turning a verb into a noun plus 'make' usually adds words without adding meaning. The general rule for this section: a collocation error is a hard error even when the meaning is clear, so fix the pair first and worry about repetition second.