- Compare the three nouns:
Economics is a demanding undergraduate degree course.(academic subject)
The Greek economyis heavily in debt.(national economy, countable)
Economyis needed to reduce the deficit.(saving money, uncountable)3 Practice A
Insert a suitable noun or adjective from the table on p. 174 into each sentence.
(a) The students were ___ their project would be successful.
(b) One of Tokyo’s ___ is its excellent transport system.
(c) There is a strong ___ that fees will rise next year.
(d) The students complained that the lecture was not ___ to their course.
(e) The results are so surprising it will be ___ to repeat the experiment.
(f) The ___ household size in Turkey is 4.1.
(g) Regularly backing up computer files reduces the ___ of losing vital
work.
(h) Revising for exams is a tedious ___.
(i) These data appear to be ___ and should not be trusted.
(j) The ___ sales figure for the year will be about three million.
(k) The ___ consequences of the war were inflation and unemployment.
(l) They attempted to make a ___ of all the different proposals.
4 Academic adjectives
The following adjectives are best understood and learnt as opposites:
absolute relative
abstract concrete
accurate inaccurate
ambiguous unambiguous
analytic synthetic
effective ineffective
exclusive inclusive
logical illogical
metaphorical literal
precise vague orapproximate orrough174 Part 3: Vocabulary for Writing