Speaking Drills

Collocations

Part 1 · Match the meaning

This isn't a vocabulary list — it's five chunks worth knowing perfectly. Each one is a fixed piece of language you can reach for instantly in a real answer, without composing it from scratch under pressure. That only works if you actually know them cold, not if you've skimmed fifty.

Knowing what a phrase means and knowing how to deploy it correctly are different skills — it's easy to learn a chunk and still use it wrong. Match the meaning first, then practice each collocation three separate times, in three different answers, so it's the deployment that becomes automatic, not just the definition.

Collocation 1 of 25
What does this mean?

“in the absence of”