FCE Exam Question
FCE Exam Question | Caroline Cooke | January 31st, 2005
As I have no staffroom where I can ask these kind of questions can anyone help me with the following?
FCE word formation:
Millions of years ago, when people faced danger daily, risk-taking was essential for .......................... (SURVIVE)
Why is the correct answer "survival" and not "surviving"?
If anyone has the time or inclination to answer, I'd appreciate it.
Caroline
Re: FCE Exam Question | Martin Lovatt | January 31st, 2005
Hi Caroline,
My Webster's Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary says:
'Usage guides have long insisted that gerunds, being nouns, must be preceded by the possessive form of the pronouns or nouns (my; your; her; his etc.) rather than by the objective forms (me; you; him; her; it; etc.).'
It goes on to state that objective forms often occur in speech and informal writing so it appears the 'rule' is only strictly adhered to in formal writing. Since 'risk-taking' is an objective pronoun, I assume that's why the answer is 'survival' rather than the gerund 'surviving'.
And as I had to look this up you can see that I didn't know the answer either, so if there are any true grammarians out there please correct me if I'm wrong!
Best regards,
Martin
Re: FCE Exam Question | Paul Raper | January 30th, 2005
Hi Caroline,
The simple explanation is:
I am assuming that the sentence terminates here or at least breaks. The reason for my saying this is because surviving might work if you were using it rather like an adjective or verb to describe a further situation, i.e. Risk-taking was essential for surviving daily danger.
Simplistically; here Risk-taking is the subject, daily danger is the object and surviving is the verb.
However what I think you have here in your example is the need for a noun, thus survival becomes the object of the sentence. Sentence construction is covered in text analysis and is written on extensively by Thomas Bloor.
If you want a good Internet site on grammar, check out this one.
You can find many other useful sites on my links page.
I know my answer is simplistic, but I think it fits.
The problem is when dealing with FCE students you can not get into complicated explanations.
Thanks
Paul
PS. The International Journal of Applied Linguistics can be found here; You can use your Athens password to access it.
Re: FCE Exam Question | Paul Raper | January 31st, 2005
The verb is "was". "Surviving daily danger" is an adverbial phrase explaining
why the adjective "essential" is justified. It is not the object of the verb,
it is the object of the preposition "for".
Dave Mackie
I take your point Dave, but not in the example I gave for what happens if you use surviving.
However, if you start to use too high-level terminology with FCE students you will confuse them.
When I teach sentence construction I work with blocks of words, i.e. Subject phrase, verb phrase, object phrase. I don't start to break down the elements into what is the object of what until I reach Advanced or even CPE level.
Paul
Re: FCE exam question | Caroline Cooke | February 1st, 2005
Dear all
Thanks for giving your time to help on the "survival v. surviving" question, I'll try the answers out on my inquisitive student! No doubt I'll have more to come....
Caroline
Re: FCE Exam question | Colin | February 10th, 2005
Hi Caroline
Millions of years ago, when people faced danger daily, risk-taking was
essential for .......................... (SURVIVE)
Why is the correct answer "survival" and not "surviving"?
Whilst I do not disagree with some of the answers given so far, I think the question lies in the lexicogrammar of "be essential for" which, on cursory inspection of COBUILD and the BNC corpora, appears to have two patterns:
1. be essential for + NOUN
2. be essential for + TV-ING + OBJ (transitive verb, -ing form)
In this case, an object for the transitive form of survive is not provided, therefore the first pattern is the best choice. Survival is the (only) appropriate noun. Surviving, by itself suggests the non-transitive use of survive, to me, and so does not fit the patterns.
It may be easier to explain/show this idea to students, and get them used to the idea that they should try to notice larger scale patterns, than introducing the complexity of the concepts behind gerund(ive) usage.
Colin
\(^_^)/
Banzai!
The survival of the fittest | David Mackie | February 10th, 2004
Hi-
This is an opinion, and not tested against a corpus of any kind, but when nouns are made from present participles, they tend to retain a sense of specific, current activity (warring, for example, is a narrower idea, in time, and space, than warfare).
For that reason, they're not usually used as objects when the verb has a future realization: e.g. : "I want to go home" is preferred to "I want going home". A want can only be satisfied some time in its future, not concurrently.
"Surviving" also retains its impression of specific current activity, and therefore doesn't match the rest of the sentence.
"Survival" is a general, abstract, timeless idea suitable for reference to something in an unspecified past age of which we have no direct experience. So "The surviving of the fittest" would probably be used when the events it connotes and the participants were observable, whereas as a general idea "The survival of the fittest" has been preferred.
As for being "correct" . . . . correct for whom, in what situation ? Hmmmmmm.
McDave
with 
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