Collocations and Useful Expressions for PTE Academic
Quantities, Qualities, and Effects
A good/great deal of time/money/work: Refers to a large quantity of research, capital, or labor. This expression is restricted to use with uncountable nouns that are not plural in form.
Quality (Excellence): Descriptive terms include poor, low, good, or high quality. Active verbs used with this concept include to improve or to enhance the quality of something.
Quality (Characteristic): Defined as a distinct trait; common verbs include have, give, display, or show quality. An example involves an artistic element providing a specific, dreamlike characteristic to a creative work.
Impact and Response: These encompass have a positive, beneficial, long-term, adverse, or profound effect on something.
Influential Factors: One may have a positive, significant, considerable, deep, great, or strong influence on something. Literacy rates within a family, for instance, significantly influence the educational achievements of descendants.
Social Trends and Personal Attitudes
Widespread Utilization: Refers to the pervasive application of something, such as the extensive use of synthetic substances in the agricultural sector.
Problematic Occurrences: Situations may cause serious or major problems, particularly regarding health risks associated with certain lifestyle habits.
Early Development: Expressions include being from or at an early or young age. For instance, children may begin the acquisition of a secondary language at a young age.
Attitudinal Orientation: To have a positive or negative attitude to or towards something. Statistics show that a large segment of the population maintains a highly positive perspective on life.
Performance Enhancement: To boost the quality of something, such as a corporation attempting to elevate the standard of its output.
Willingness and Hesitation: Being willing, unwilling, or reluctant to perform an action. For example, a segment of the student body might be reluctant to undertake a specific writing task.
Social Awareness and Demographics
Growth in Membership: A vast growing number of entities or individuals, such as an industry association experiencing a rapid increase in its participants.
Consciousness: Being aware of something, such as security forces maintaining vigilance regarding the threat of terror.
Oblivious: Being apparently or seemingly oblivious to or of something. This is a synonym for being unaware, such as a governing body appearing blind to unfolding events.
Raising Awareness: Efforts to raise public, social, or environmental awareness about specific issues. It is often considered the duty of a central authority to inform the public about viral risks.
Functional Significance: Playing an important or vital role in a process or outcome, such as an educator's influence on a student's final results.
Deciding Variables: A decisive factor or a determining criterion. In professional life, formal education is often considered a critical variable for advancement.
Labor and Resource Accessibility
Workforce Categorization: Labor can be classified as skilled, unskilled, experienced, or inexperienced. A proficient workforce is considered central to the progress of a civilization.
Utility and Satisfaction: Being highly beneficial or advantageous to a cause, such as high-intensity physical activity benefiting general health. Satisfaction is defined as feeling content about something or being satisfied/unsatisfied with a specific outcome.
Provisioning: To provide someone with something or provide something for someone. Personal skill sets can provide a community with observable benefits.
Resource Access: Having easy or instant access to facilities. For example, individuals on a university campus often enjoy direct access to specialized researchers and libraries.
Obligations, Comparisons, and Constraints
Responsibility Management: To undertake a heavy, major, basic, or onerous responsibility for a situation. Frequently, individuals are hesitant to accept a burdensome duty for problematic outcomes.
Deprivation and Prohibition: Depriving someone of something or banning someone from doing an activity. Legal consequences might involve being barred from operating a vehicle for a set duration.
Streamlining: To facilitate or ease a process. Technology is frequently utilized to simplify the acquisition of language.
Comparing and Contrasting:
Comparison with something (e.g., comparing current cinematic works to previous entries to assess development).
In comparison with/to something else.
Comparing something/someone to or with another (e.g., matching physical evidence like fingerprints with data from a source).
Pricing reductions, such as a decrease compared with the previous annual cycle.
Compulsion and Exposure: To compel someone to perform an action (often regarding child labor). Exposure involves being subjected to a substance, such as workers being exposed to high levels of radiation.
Inherent Tendencies: Being prone to something or prone to doing something, such as the natural inclination of children toward specific food types.
Benefits, Health, and Familiarity
Advantage and Probability: To benefit from or benefit by an intervention. Statistics might show that residents of specific regions are more or less likely to experience certain economic conditions.
Utilization: Taking full advantage of available resources or surroundings.
Suffering: To suffer from a condition, such as a person experiencing poor health.
Personal Knowledge:
To be familiar with an object or system.
To be on familiar terms with someone, meaning to know them well enough to communicate informally.
To be acquainted with a subject or person (e.g., being well-versed in historical literature).
To acquaint someone with facts or data.
Behavioral Leanings: To have an aggressive, suicidal, criminal, or artistic tendency to or towards something. Certain medications may have a side-effect tendency to cause physical discomfort.
Search and Comfort: Being in search of something, which is a synonym for looking for it. Basic or local amenities refer to the essential facilities people require, such as those found near city centers.
Professional Status and Recognition
Visual Interaction: Giving a person a furtive, nervous, meaningful, sideways, or brief glance (a quick look).
Academic Honors: To confer a title, degree, or honor on or upon an individual. This may result in receiving an honorary degree from an institution, such as an honorary doctorate from Seoul University.
Aspiration: To seek fame and fortune, often involving a move to a major metropolitan area.
Ideological Alignment: To not sit well with someone, meaning a statement or action conflicts with their established beliefs.
Jeopardy:
To be in grave, serious, or mortal danger of an occurrence (e.g., a vessel in danger of sinking).
To be in danger of extinction, as seen with certain biological species.
Survival and Growth: To eke out a living or existence, defined as managing to survive with very limited resources.
Scale of Change: A handful refers to a very small number. Conversely, to rocket refers to a massive increase, such as sales figures jumping from to units per annum.
Regulatory Status: To exempt someone from an obligation. In professional contexts, charities may be exempted from tax payments. In casual speech, this is referred to as letting someone off.
Mastery and Logical Frameworks
Proficiency: To gain, achieve, have, or demonstrate technical, complete, or absolute mastery of a specific subject.
Justification: The rationale behind, for, or of something. This involves the underlying reason for utilizing a specific method to achieve a goal.
Relative Importance: Identifying that something else is equally important, such as professional practice being as vital as theoretical education.
Contrasting Concepts: A dichotomy between two things, such as the divide between a public persona and a private life.
Simultaneity: Concurrent development or improvement involving multiple elements, such as the simultaneous advancement of technical skill and creative expression.
Completion: To come to fruition, bring to fruition, or reach fruition, referring to the successful conclusion of a project.
Integration: To graft something onto something else, meaning to add a distinct element so it becomes an integral part of the whole.
Cognitive Processes and Reactions
Creative Problem Solving: To come up with a solution, idea, or answer.
Contextual Discovery: To come to do something can mean performing an action by chance or without initial planning. It can also describe a transition in opinion, such as eventually believing in someone's innocence.
Acceptance: To come to terms with something, defined as accepting an unpleasant or sad reality so that it no longer causes distress.
Temporal Spacing: Intervals between events, which may occur at regular intervals.
Overwhelming Influence: To be gripped by something, such as a nation being gripped by economic strife or an individual being gripped by sudden panic.
Contrition: To regret doing an action or to regret to say, inform, or tell someone something.
Enthusiasm: To be keen to do something, keen on doing something, or keen for an event to occur.
Connectivity: Things being inextricably linked, bound up, or mixed. This indicates that one situation is fundamentally connected to another past event.
Provocation: Something that sparks or provokes a reaction, such as a legislative decision sparking widespread protest.
Procedural and Economic Control
Implication: To entail something else, meaning it causes a redefinition of concepts or involves specific steps like changing transport during a journey.
Continuous Flow: A steady, constant, or endless stream of objects, events, or people.
Instruction: To drill something into someone, referring to the repetitive teaching of behavior from a young age.
Protective Actions:
To refrain from fidgeting with objects.
To ward off something, defined as performing an action to protect oneself from a negative force.
To collide with someone or something, indicating a physical impact with an object moving in a different direction. Mentally, it refers to a strong disagreement between groups.
Regulatory Control: To rein in something (starting strict control) or to give someone free rein (granting complete freedom). One can also give full or free rein to an internal feeling or imagination.
Economic Failure: Expressions for business collapse include to go bankrupt, go under, or go bust.
Power Disruptions: Terminology includes the lights going out, a blackout, power cut, power failure, power outage, or power failure.
Mental States and Collaboration
Emotional Change: To become successful, angry, happy, or depressed.
Selection: To decide on or agree on something after careful deliberation.
Cultural Adaptation: To be or become attuned to something, meaning one is familiar with the thinking or behavior of a specific market or group.
Chance Encounters: To happen on or upon something, meaning to find it by chance.
Deception: To dupe someone into doing something, which is a synonym for deceiving them.
Partnership: To team up with someone to complete a task.
Legacy and Progression:
To get left behind with work or payments.
To hand something down to future generations, either through physical inheritance or word of mouth.
To come to or reach a dead end, where no further progress is possible.
Fixation: To be obsessed by or with something, leading to constant worry or thought about that specific topic.
Behavioral Norms and Incentives
Tolerance: To put up with something, such as enduring a difficult temperament.
Abstinence: To refrain from doing an action, which is synonymous with abstaining.
Compression: To cram something into or onto a small space, such as forcing a high volume of information into a single text.
Generosity and Excess:
Lavish as an adjective implies large scale, impressive lifestyle, or expensive quality.
Lavish as a verb means to be generous with something or to lavish attention/love on someone.
Inevitability: Something was meant to happen or to be, implying a situation was certain and unpreventable.
Secret Strategy: To have something up one's sleeve, referring to a hidden plan or trick kept for later use.
Motivation: To provide, create, or give an incentive for someone to perform an action or improve a skill.
Structural and Situational Expressions
Causality and Method:
In order for/that, used so that a process like photosynthesis can occur.
So as to (formal), used to describe an action taken for a specific purpose, like maintaining a speed of to conserve fuel.
Substitution: To replace one element with another, such as replacing staff with part-time labor.
Physical Properties: To grind against or together, often used in the context of tectonic plates.
Elevation: Expressed as an altitude of or in altitude. High altitudes, such as , are noted for lower oxygen levels.
Opinionated Speech: To pontificate about or on something, giving an opinion while assuming one is always correct.
Distinction: To be notable for a specific feature, like a town being known for a particular market.
Ambition: In pursuit of something, such as moving to a new region in search of employment.
Positioning: To take or have pride of place, meaning something is placed in the most prominent location for viewing.
Rejection: To turn away from something, such as consumers ceasing the use of specific financial tools.
Aversion: A distaste for something, defined as finding it morally offensive or unpleasant.
Time and Effort
Beginnings: The dawn of civilization or the dawn of time, signifying the moment something first appeared.
Maximum Capacity:
To be bursting or bulging at the seams, meaning a place is so full of people that nobody else can fit.
To be coming or falling apart at the seams, indicating many things are going wrong simultaneously.
Intense Emotion: To be petrified with fear or fright, rendering one unable to move or think.
Procrastination: To put off or put off doing something, which means to delay the task.
Independence: To take it upon or on oneself to do something, deciding to act without securing prior permission.
Initiation: To set about doing something, or to start dealing with a task. Conversely, to set someone against another means to incite conflict between them.
Longevity: To stand the test of time, remaining popular or relevant over a long period.
Merit: Something may deserve consideration or attention, such as a serious proposal.
Introduction of Difficulty: Not to mention is used to introduce an additional factor that complicates a situation.
Professional Completion and Direction
Resolution:
To get something over or over with, meaning to finish an unpleasant task.
To get over a problem, meaning to successfully deal with a difficulty.
Abundance: To supply someone with something or provide a wealth of useful resources.
Precision: Just can mean exactly or only. Specific phrases include just the thing (the right item), just then (at that moment), and just as (the exact moment when).
Absence: To be void of something, meaning to lack it completely (e.g., being void of expression).
Reform: To shake someone or something up, making changes to an organization to increase effectiveness.
Preparation: To set the stage for something, making a future event possible.
Leadership:
To steer something through or to something, such as guiding a company through an economic downturn.
To steer someone towards or away from something, influencing their behavior or path.
Advanced Academic and Professional Interactions
Peak Achievement: The culmination of something, representing the end of a long period of work (e.g., the culmination of of effort).
Submission: To put forward a proposal, suggestion, idea, or argument.
Identification Errors: To mistake someone or something for another, such as misidentifying medical symptoms.
Integration: To blend in with surroundings or match a background.
Exclusion: With the exception of, meaning excluding a specific person or thing.
Communication: To inform someone about, of, or that something has happened.
Unrestrained Behavior: To do something with reckless, wild, or grand abandon, indicating lack of control.
Duration: For an extended period of time, meaning longer than originally intended.
Self-Sufficiency: To fend for yourself, meaning to look after your own needs.
Persistence and Influence
Increased Effort: To redouble one's effort, greatly increasing the energy spent on a task.
Affliction: To be plagued by or with something, or to plague someone with questions.
Vigilance: To keep a close eye or watch on something, monitoring it carefully.
Support: To fortify someone or something with resources.
Inclination and Reluctance:
To not be averse to something, meaning one enjoys it despite it being slightly negative.
To be averse to doing something, meaning one is unwilling.
Thoroughness: A comprehensive range of something implies it is thorough. Common uses include comprehensive insurance, studies, or education policies.
Organization: To mount a campaign, challenge, or attack. As a verb, it can also mean to increase, such as mounting tension.
Comparisons and Capabilities
Analogy: To take, make, or draw an analogy with, to, or between things to show similarity.
Essentiality: To be an integral part of something, meaning it is a necessary component.
Hindrance: Something getting in the way of something else, obstructing progress.
Standard: To be of high caliber, indicating a high quality of work or skill.
Assumptions and Evidence:
I take it (meaning to assume).
To take someone for something (a mistaken identity or judgement).
To take someone or something to be something else.
To take something as evidence, proof, or a starting point.
Personal Era: In or from his days, referring to a time when someone was at their peak of success.
Competence: To be capable of doing something, having the required ability.
Affinity: To be partial to something, meaning one likes it very much.
Control: To be under someone's thumb, meaning to be under their complete influence.
Strategic Intent and Foundation
Trade-offs: At the expense of someone or something, indicating that one gain causes another's harm.
Objective:
To be aimed at doing something.
To act with the aim of doing something.
To aim something at a specific demographic.
To aim for an improvement.
Sensitivity: To have an allergy to something, or to be allergic to it (humorously used to describe a dislike for a task).
Support Structures: To be a pillar of strength, society, community, or the church. Access to modern resources may be considered a pillar of civilization.
Commencement: At the onset of something or to delay the onset of a condition through healthy choices.
Verification: To back up an accusation or show that what someone says is true.
Network, Honor, and Perception
Connections: A network of people or organizations that support one another.
Desire: To long to do something, long for something, or long for someone to do something, especially when the event is unlikely.
Publicity: To raise someone's profile, gaining more public attention through media campaigns.
Participation: To sign up to do something.
Advancement: To improve on or upon a previous record or score, such as surpassing a total of .
Commemoration: In honor of someone or to honor the memory of a person.
Doubt: To have or express reservations about a decision or appointment.
False Impressions: To give or create an illusion of something, such as modern financial tools making ownership appear easier than it is.
Prevention: To head something off, intervening to stop a conflict from occurring.
Evaluation and Environmental Context
Retrospective Understanding: The benefit or wisdom of hindsight, understanding a situation only after it has concluded.
Academic Concentration:
To major in a subject (American English), meaning one's primary university focus.
To major on a subject (British English), meaning to pay particular attention to it.
Crowding: To swarm with people or animals, describing a moving crowd.
Emphasis: To put weight on a decision or to accentuate it.
Advantage: To give someone the edge, providing a small competitive superiority.
Integration: To fit in with a group and be accepted by others.
Overwhelming Presence: To flood something with items, such as a country being flooded with counterfeit materials.
Manipulation: To trick someone into performing an action.
Saturation: To be steeped in history, tradition, or politics, meaning a place or study is filled with that quality.
Representation: To be an expression of a concept, such as an individual being an expression of creativity.
Ethics, Research, and Adaptability
Purpose: For the sake of something or someone, in order to improve or please them.
Solidarity: To unite against or behind someone to achieve a common goal.
Subservience: To be or become a slave to something, such as being a slave to fashion trends.
Failure to Meet Standards: To fall short of something, like a vote count falling short of a majority.
Source Attribution: To attribute something to someone or something, believing it was caused by that factor.
Financial Mismanagement: To throw money at a problem, attempting to solve it with high spending without proper thought.
Leisurely Movement: To stroll down, over, or along a location in a relaxed manner.
Specialty: To be someone's forte, the thing they do most skillfully.
Investigation: Research into or on a subject, like the causes of a disease.
Avoidance: To draw a veil over an incident, avoiding discussion of a past event.
Aimless Movement:
To drift around or along without a plan.
To drift into an occupation.
To drift away from a group.
To have a conversation drift from one topic to another.
Worry: To fret about or over something unnecessarily.
Perception of Beauty: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning opinions on aesthetics vary.
Pervasive Coverage: To be blanketed in or with something, like snow on a roof or a specific influence over a continent.
Design and Fit: To be geared to someone or something, meaning it is organized for a specific group.
Requirements: Needing significant skill or effort, such as tasks that are intellectually, physically, or emotionally demanding.
Relief: To alleviate a problem, situation, or suffering, making it less painful.
Occurrence: To come about, referring to an event happening, often in an unplanned way.