You scored 86% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 87% Advanced, and 72% Expert!
Pretty good, considering I'm sub-18 and English is only my second language, I'd say.
"We observe the behaviour of simple folk, and derive pleasure from their defects."
-Aristotle - Book of Humour
English: 100/100/93/94
I read over the English answer key, take her "rules" with a grain of salt. The author of the test made a number of errors, most notably in that she is inconsistent with her evaluation of the importance of expert opinion versus colloquial usage.
Specifically:
#17: Invaluable and priceless are technically synonymous, though colloquially they are never used interchangeably amongst native American speakers. Paintings are priceless, assistance is invaluable, and never vice versa. Here she has arbitrarily deemed that the technical definitions take precedence.
#22: Her assessment here is just blatantly incorrect. She provided context that shaded the meaning of the missing word, and the primary definition of criticize is not neutral.
#30: Her answer here is correct, however she commits an egregious error in her explanation of the answer. She comments that a period would have worked in place of the semicolon. This is incorrect. It is (technically) never permitted to begin a sentence with however, though 99.9% of Americans do so. It seems that here she prefers colloquial usage over technical accuracy.
#33: Answer a. is technically incorrect, because stay does not take on that meaning as a transitive verb. Answer a. is merely how Americans speak.
#34: Here is an example of a rule that even experts have abandoned due to hundreds of years of misuse. 300 years ago her analysis would have been technically correct, but not any more. Another interesting example of this phenomenon is the merging of the two future tenses in English into just one future tense. There are (were) technically two future tenses in English differentiated by whether you use will or shall in any particular point of view. Even experts acknowledge, however, that differentiating the two future tenses is nothing more than an anachronism.
#36: Nauseous and nauseated are simply not synonyms, and I'm sure Strunk is turning in his grave at her perpetration of this myth. Nauseous means nauseating, not nauseated. Almost all Americans misuse this word.
Google: 100/100
1 minute, 31 seconds.
I used Google on five questions, IMDB for one question, and knew the answers to four questions. For the curious, #5 took me the longest (probably close to 30 seconds), while #1 took virtually no time at all.
Joined: 8/25/2004
Posts: 44
Location: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
xebra wrote:
#36: Nauseous and nauseated are simply not synonyms, and I'm sure Strunk is turning in his grave at her perpetration of this myth. Nauseous means nauseating, not nauseated. Almost all Americans misuse this word.
I figured I'd look this up on m-w.com:
Main Entry: nau·seous
Pronunciation: 'no-sh&s, 'no-zE-&s
Function: adjective
1 : causing nausea or disgust : NAUSEATING
2 : affected with nausea or disgust
- nau·seous·ly adverb
- nau·seous·ness noun
usage Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only in sense 1 and that in sense 2 it is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous in sense 1 is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous in sense 2.
Joined: 5/17/2004
Posts: 106
Location: Göteborg, Sweden
xebra wrote:
I used Google on five questions, IMDB for one question, and knew the answers to four questions. For the curious, #5 took me the longest (probably close to 30 seconds), while #1 took virtually no time at all.
Not using google to find answers on a test of your ability to search with google will skew your score rather badly. 'course, it's hard to avoid "cheating" when you know the answers beforehand, but using that knowledge still invalidates the test.
Also, isn't she perpetuating the myth, not perpetrating it? I'd have guessed perpetuate if asked on the test we all just took but, according to the same test, you're better at this than I.
Fro Jackson:
It is true that naseous has acquired, through extensive colloquial misuse, a secondary meaning. Nauseated is still clearly "more correct" simply because no one argues about its meaning. Merriam-Webster is also not the authority ... it's just one of them. There are other (more prestigious) sources that disagree with them.
Xerophyte:
You could quite correctly use perpetuate here, though that is not the meaning I wished to convey. Perpetrate has a negative connotation, and you hardly ever hear the word used outside of the phrase "to perpetrate a crime." Thus the myth is a crime which the author of the test has perpetrated (and incedentally perpetuated.) Please, suffer me being poetic, I'm passionate about language.
Joined: 5/4/2004
Posts: 90
Location: New Brunswick, Canada
Advanced
You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 87% Advanced, and 72% Expert!
That's disheartening.
I just verified the key and double checked my answers, and I snagged all of the '2 point' answers for Beginner, so... *shrug*.
And in Intermediate, well, looks like the 'invaluable/priceless' 'either a or b' option was the only mistake I made. I'm quite confused on the scoring system.
Same with Advanced, only one 'either a or b'.
And Expert? The sensual/sensuous answer.
Not sure how the score is calculated... *ponder*.
