Fluctuative?!
Posted by Pak Guru on March 15th, 2016 | 7 responses | IELTS, Task 1, vocabulary, writing
Since the abolition of fuel subsidies, prices have been fluctuative.
Nice try! The IELTS examiner will understand that you are trying to make an adjective from the verb ‘fluctuate’ using ‘ive’. Normally this would be a good strategy, but there is no such word as ‘fluctuative’ and so this time you will receive a low score for vocabulary.
The safest approach is to use the verb form:
- ..prices have fluctuated.
Alternatively, you can make an adjective phrase using the noun form and featuring some collocation:
- ..prices have been subject to fluctuation.
Finally you might try some more fancy academic collocation:
- ..prices have tended to fluctuate.
Now go ahead and remove fluctuative from your list of ‘ive’ adjectives!
7 responses to “Fluctuative?!”
Leave a Reply
GuruEAP
Subscribe to GuruEAP for all the latest posts and other news! It's free, and you can easily unsubscribe when you're ready to move on.
Steve, i still don’t get the meaning of “have been subject to”. i have read this words several times in some article but I confuse how to translate it and to use it
Thank you Steve,
A paraphrase would be “have experienced fluctuation”.
It does marked as incorrect spelling in my word processor. We do have word ‘fluktuatif’ in Bahasa Indonesia, and this word is very ‘academic’. Maybe another direct translation @eapguru 😀
Aha, no wonder! Many thanks for the expert analysis @imranedu 🙂
That’s a bit different. In ‘Use your head,’ ‘use’ is an imperative verb!
but you use smiley 🙂 instead of :(, for the fluctuative.
Oops! OK fixed 🙂