PHRASAL VOCABULARY SIZE TEST – RECOGNITION
This test can help tell you how many ‘phrasal expressions’ you know. For example,
the single word ‘have’ has one meaning, but phrasal expression ‘have to’ has a
different meaning – and that meaning is not clear if you only know the individual
words (‘have’ + ‘to’). Knowing both kinds of vocabulary (single words and phrasal
expressions) may help your reading comprehension, for example.
This test gives you an idea of how many phrasal expressions you know from the
PHRASE List (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012), a list of the 505 most common phrasal
expressions. The test has 40 questions, ten at each of the first 5 thousand-levels of
word frequency. For example, the first 10 phrasal expressions on the test are as
common as the top 1,000 words in English (in the British National Corpus).
Instructions
In each question, find the phrase that has the closest meaning to the vocabulary in
the sentence, and click the small circle next to the best meaning. Here is an
example:
1.
GO AWAY: They will go away.
a. travel fast
 b. leave
c. be tired
d. play
1.
GO AWAY: They will go away.
a. travel fast
 b. leave
c. be tired
d. play
In the example, the best meaning for GO AWAY is answer b, "leave,” so the circle
beside this answer is the one you should click. In this small demonstration, the
button has been clicked for you.
You should try to do the full test to get the best idea of how many phrasal
expressions you know.