Unit 1c Book

The word “laser” is often part of technical collocations, for example: a laser beam, a laser pointer, a high-precision laser, and so on. Sometimes, the word “laser” can be used as an adjective, for instance, in a laser spectrometer, laser technology, and the laser industry. As you can see, collocations are set expressions of words that frequently occur together to form a phrase which is felt to be a unique technical phrase. This means that if you need to look up such a phrase in a dictionary, you should NOT look for each of the two words separately, but rather find a dictionary that provides a list of these collocations. In reality, you will hardly ever be successful: most dictionaries do not have such a collocation section. Although some online collocation dictionaries exist, for example, on link, they only cover general English, not technical English. Therefore, a much more effective way is to come up with a tip on the correct collocation and google it using quotation marks. If the number of hits is in the order of millions or hundred thousands and if the collocation is used in technical contexts written by native speakers, you can be a hundred percent sure it is correct. On the contrary, if there are only a few hits or none at all and Google displays results of a search without the quotation marks, you can be a hundred percent sure that your tip was not correct. However, if you look at the results for the collocation without the quotation marks, you should get an idea of the correct collocation. Then you should just take this new tip, put it in quotation marks and repeat the googling process to see whether this new tip is correct. Now try Task 1, Task 2 and Task 3 focusing on collocations.