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Synonyms
The other day in an English class in Madrid the pupils come across the word "within" in a university entrance exam reading comprehension practice test. In response to a student's enquiry about the meaning of this word, the teacher dismissed the question by saying that it was the some as "in". Wrong. I don't understand why teachers do this. Perhaps they don't know the difference between the two words or they don't think the difference is significant or that the level of the class does not merit an explanation. One of the students should have asked, "Why do both words exist?" If we followed this teacher's example we could eliminate half of the words in the English language. Synonyms, by definition, are words that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses. There's no reason why a great man has to be a big man.
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