Lesson: Multi-Word Answer Choices

Comment on Multi-Word Answer Choices

"she was too valuable a team member to be legitimately censured"

does this sentence not mean that she was so valuable that no one can disaprove her?
greenlight-admin's picture

That's correct. No one can LEGITIMATELY censure her. So, if someone censures here, those actions are NOT legitimate.

Hey, maybe you will have some good recommendations. English is not my first language. I am learning the words for a long time and would say that I know the majority at this point, but how can I know if the second word is legitimate?
Someone who English is his main language 'upon' after commenting may probably just sound wrong, but I don't have these sound feelings.

In this question I stopped on 'prattle' and 'commented', and eventually chose 'commented' because, in addition to 'documentary' in the sentence, it sounded more official phrase than prattle.
greenlight-admin's picture

Great question.
The part about UPON involves a tricky area in English grammar called idioms.
When it comes to idioms, there are no formal rules regarding word choice; instead it's just "the way we say them."

For example, the sentence "Paris is different FROM Madrid" is idiomatically correct, whereas the sentence "Paris is different THAN Madrid" is idiomatically incorrect.
What's the grammatical rule here?
There's no rule; it's just the way we've agreed to compare things using the word DIFFERENT.

Similarly, the sentence "Joe commented ON the facts of the case" is idiomatically correct, whereas the sentence "Joe commented UPON the facts of the case" is idiomatically incorrect.

So if I understand you correctly, it is no good way to study it, it depends more on my 'life experience' using the English language? In the real life, I find myself commonly just guessing what word to use (at, to, for,...), and hoping that people will forgive me...
greenlight-admin's picture

That's correct. This is one of the many examples of why English is harder to learn than other languages.

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