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Good morning, good afternoon or even good evening depending of course on what part of
the world you happen to be in right now. In today's academic vocabulary lesson we are
going to be looking at the word "accept". Before I start I should point out that in
these lessons I am looking at some of the most common academic vocabulary words. And
the common collocations that they have, that is the words which go with them a lot. And
I am only going to be looking at academic collocations or collocations that commonly
appear in academic writing because for example the word "accept" has a lot of words which
collocate with it. I mean a lot of words. But a lot of those will not actually appear
that often in academic writing. So if you want to know more about the kind of a collocation
for the word "accept", I recommend that you check a good collocations dictionary, because
I will only be covering the academic collocations. Some of the words which collocate with the
word "accept" the most often are commonly, generally and widely to make the terms commonly
accepted, generally accepted, and widely accepted. All three of these terms have basically the
same meaning that is something which is accepted or believed to be true by most people but
not everyone. For example it is commonly accepted that the world's climate is changing. Darwin's
Theory of Evolution is generally accepted to be correct. It is widely accepted that
the younger you are when you start learning a second language the better. Another very
common collocation that uses the word accept is "universally accepted". This unlike generally,
commonly or widely accepted means something which is accepted by everyone universally.
There are not many examples of things which are universally accepted however you may often
come across this collocation in the negative. In fact many theories in science always have
two or more sides which believe completely opposite things .So it is very difficult to
say that anything or any theory is truly universally accepted. For example Darwin's Theory of Evolution
is generally accepted to be true; however there are those which believe it is not true.
So we can't say that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is universally accepted. Two words from the
same word family as accept are acceptance and acceptable. Now these two words have their
own different meanings and their own different collocations. However I don't believe that
they warrant a separate video lesson, so I am going to talk about these two words and
their collocations very briefly now in this lesson.
A word which often collocates with acceptance is wide-spread to make the term wide-spread
acceptance. This is used to refer to something which is commonly, generally or widely accepted.
For example wide-spread acceptance of the younger the better when it comes to learning
a second language has led to a rapid increase in the number of English conversation schools
that provide lessons to very, very, small children.
A word which often collocates with the word acceptable is socially, to make the term socially
acceptable. This is used to refer to something which is deemed okay to do or not within a
specific culture. For example in Japan, it is considered socially acceptable to slurp
your food especially if you are eating some kind of noodles; however in the UK this is
generally not a sociably acceptable thing to do. So there we have it, the word accept.
Today I talked about four very common collocations; commonly accepted, widely accepted, generally
accepted or universally accepted. My question for you today is, do you know of something
which is commonly, widely or generally accepted? And can you think of something which is universally
accepted? If you can, leave your example in the comments below this video, and I will
see you in the next lesson. By the way, just before I go I want to let
you know that Doing English also has a Face book page. On that page I post updates about
new video lessons and also about video lessons which are coming soon. I also post other things
which I think would be very useful for English learners but not enough to make into a full
video lesson .So if you haven't already, go down below this video and like the Doing English
Face book page.