Vocabulary and grammar in context
What this domain tests
Grammar and vocabulary appear as a single blank in a sentence or short dialogue, where two options are grammatically possible and only one fits the meaning, the collocation, or the register. Ordering items (整序英作文) ask you to rebuild a sentence from scrambled chunks.
Core rules
- Decide the part of speech before the meaning: after a determiner you need a noun, after be an adjective or participle, after a modal a bare infinitive, after a preposition a gerund.
- Collocation beats dictionary meaning: make a decision, do research, take measures, pay attention to, have an influence on.
- Verb patterns are frequent targets: suggest/recommend + -ing (never to), look forward to + -ing, prevent X from -ing, allow X to do, insist on + -ing.
- In ordering items, build fixed chunks first (in spite of, as soon as, not only … but also, the more … the more), then place the main verb, then check agreement and tense.
- Check sequence of tenses: reported speech and 仮定法過去完了 need one step further back than the surrounding past tense.
Worked example
並べ替え: 「彼はその知らせを聞いてどれほど驚いたかを私に話した。」 / told / me / he / how / surprised / to hear / the news / he / had been Chunks: how + adjective + subject + verb (indirect question); surprised to hear (emotion plus its cause); the being surprised happened before the telling, so had been. Result: He told me how surprised he had been to hear the news. Using how surprised he was is wrong because it makes the two events simultaneous.
Traps
- Choosing a word because its Japanese gloss matches, ignoring the collocation.
- Forgetting the preposition (insist on, depend on, be responsible for).
- Leaving a bare infinitive after a preposition or after suggest.
- In ordering items, assembling a grammatical sentence whose meaning does not match the Japanese prompt.