The accident took place because of the criminal ________ of the driver.
- (a)performance
- (b)disregard
- (c)negligence
- (d)slackness
Correct — C, negligence. 'Criminal negligence' is the settled phrase for a failure to take the care a reasonable person would take, serious enough to attract the law, and that is exactly what causes an accident and what the adjective 'criminal' is waiting to attach itself to.
- (a)performance — 'Performance' names how well a task was carried out and is a neutral word; it does not by itself name a failure of care, so 'criminal performance' explains nothing about the accident.
- (b)disregard — 'Disregard' has to be disregard of something — of the rules, of a warning — and the sentence supplies no such object, leaving the phrase incomplete.
- (d)slackness — 'Slackness' is general laziness or want of effort, too mild and too vague for the legal weight that 'criminal' is placing on the noun.
A word-choice item decided by a fixed collocation — one adjective and one noun that habitually travel together in legal English.
Three of the options could loosely describe a careless driver, so meaning alone will not separate them. The deciding test is which noun the adjective 'criminal' regularly qualifies, and in the language of accidents and liability that noun is 'negligence'.
- Negligence in law is the failure to exercise the care that a reasonable person would exercise in the circumstances.
- 'Negligence' comes from Latin negligere, to neglect or not pick up, and keeps that sense of something left undone.
- Settling for a word that is roughly right in meaning when the sentence is testing a fixed pairing.
- Choosing a noun that cannot stand without a complement the sentence never supplies.
Asked as a fill-the-blank item where an adjective already in the sentence points to the one noun that idiom allows.
Although they took every precaution, they could not ________ the accident.
- (a) defer
- (b) allow
- (c) avoid
- (d) block
Answer(c) avoid
The same accident vocabulary and the same test. Four words that all gesture at stopping something are narrowed to the one English idiom actually uses with 'accident'; here four words that all gesture at carelessness are narrowed by the adjective 'criminal'.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that best fills the blank — The court held the contractor liable for gross ________ in leaving the pit unfenced.
- (a)performance
- (b)negligence
- (c)attention
- (d)hesitation
Answer(b) negligence — 'gross negligence' is the standing phrase for a serious failure of care.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word that best fills the blank — He showed complete ________ for his own safety when he entered the burning house.
- (a)negligence
- (b)slackness
- (c)disregard
- (d)performance
Answer(c) disregard — 'disregard for' takes the object the sentence supplies.