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Latin/German 3 gapfill Bookmark and Share

Special Focus - information and contents

English is a Germanic language, that is, it belongs to the same family of languages as German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, and shares a core vocabulary with these languages. However, a very large proportion of words in English derives ultimately from Latin, which is the mother language of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.

As a result, English has many synonym pairs, with one from Germanic and one from Latin or French. Usually, if the Germanic synonym is informal or colloquial, the Latin synonym is neutral or more formal. If the Germanic synonym is neutral, the Latin synonym is either also neutral or more formal than the Germanic one.

The sentences below are in pairs, with the first sentence in each pair (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11) expressed in informal or colloquial language, and the second sentence (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) expressed in more formal or official language. After reading through the sentence pairs to get the gist, for each pair select a phrasal verb (which are mostly Germanic in origin) from box A and put it in the first sentence and then choose a Latin derived word from box B to put in the second sentence. Make sure you put them in the correct forms.

A B
go along, join in, make up, pick up, run away, tip off abscond, acquire, fabricate, inform, participate, proceed

1. Come here and (1) our game. We need another player.

2. The organisers of the competition are looking for more people to (2) in it.

3. Everything Nick said about what happened is a pack of lies. He (3) the whole thing.

4. The defence lawyer told the court that the police had (4) the confession and that it could not therefore be used as evidence against his client.



5. Driving isn't a very easy thing to (5) , but if you practise every day, you'll learn quickly.

6. Studies of babies show that they start to (6) language skills at a very early age.

7. If there's anything that you don't understand, you can ask questions as we (7) , but I'd prefer you to save your questions till the end of the talk.

8. As last year's students (8) through the course, it became clear that they would do exceptionally well.



9. Some kids were throwing stones at my windows, but when I went out to talk to them, they just (9) down the road.

10. Tom Baxter was sent back to a closed prison because he had (10) three times from the open prison.

11. Someone had (11) the police about the bank robbery, so they were waiting for the robbers when they arrived at the bank.

12. It is every citizen's duty to (12) the authorities of any criminal activity that they know about.



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