Vocabulary and Lexical Usage
Vocabulary and lexical usage tests precision rather than breadth: whether you know a word's exact meaning, the words it habitually partners with, its level of formality, and the attitude it carries. Expect collocation items, easily confused pairs, phrasal verbs, idioms, and cloze sentences where two options share a meaning but only one fits the grammar of the gap.
What is actually tested
- Collocation: words that conventionally travel together - make a decision, do research, heavy rain, strong argument, deeply concerned. These are learned as chunks, not derived by logic.
- Register: commence / begin / start, request / ask, purchase / buy. Formal prose avoids contractions and vague intensifiers.
- Connotation: thrifty versus stingy, childlike versus childish - same denotation, opposite evaluation.
- Word families: economic (relating to the economy), economical (money-saving), sensible versus sensitive.
- Grammatical behaviour: whether a word takes a preposition (depend on, comprise with no of), is countable, or is followed by -ing.
Worked example
The board agreed to ___ the decision until the auditors reported. A. put out B. put off C. put up D. put away The gap needs “postpone”; only put off carries that sense, and it separates freely (put the decision off). Answer: B.
Traps
A synonym that fits the meaning but not the collocation is the commonest distractor (do a mistake instead of make a mistake). Watch -ed/-ing adjective pairs (bored/boring) and idioms read too literally.