Formal and Lexical Aspect of Language

The biggest vocabulary skill in the chapter is not knowing a word but working it out, and the paper tests it in three recognisable shapes. In the first, a word stands inside a sentence that already carries a clue about it, and the question asks only what the word means there: a man is appreciated for being ambidextrous, so the word must name something the sentence's speaker would praise; a patient looked haggard after five hours of surgery, so the word must name a visible state rather than a sound or an object. The clue is the neighbour, the word that fixes the tone before the target word has to be understood.

In the second shape the word is given largely alone and four meanings are offered, one of which shares its core sense: bashful, reluctant, curious, spill, ancestor, ritual, perish, loathsome, sidle, brassy, dissonance, diaspora, bowdlerize. Here the evidence is the option list itself, because the examiner writes one option that carries the word's sense and three that do not, often a bland positive and one near neighbour. The recorded answers show the pattern plainly: bashful is embarrassed rather than rude, reluctant is hesitant rather than rude, curious is keen rather than casual, and spill is spread rather than spoil.

The third shape reverses the direction. A sentence has a blank where a noun, verb or adjective belongs and the four options are candidate words, only one of which fits both the grammar of the sentence and its sense: a centuries-old palace could not withstand the havoc of heavy rains; the pomp and ceremony of a royal marriage filled the television; an old instructor might seem an elegy's subject, but an elegy is written on the death of someone dear. These are not three separate skills. The student who reads the whole sentence before reading the options will usually find that the paper has already given away the answer.