Foreword by the author

There is hardly another language in the world that would be both as simple and as complex as English. Nouns here do not have a gender category and do not change by case, the conjugation system is reduced to a minimum. It would seem how simple everything is. But this simplicity comes at a price. The English language exacts a toll from its users by exploiting the polysemy of words and the similarity of constructions. Remove or add an article - and the sentence changes its meaning. There is no need to talk about prepositions. Even using a different tense form can completely change the meaning of what is being said—a phenomenon unthinkable in other languages. What about phrasal verbs? Two phrasal verbs that seem to have opposite meanings (for example, slow up and slow down) can mean the same thing. And vice versa: the same verb can have two opposite meanings. How not to get confused and trapped in this labyrinth of ambiguity? To do this, you need to clearly understand the difference between outwardly similar words and constructions. This book will help you see and understand this difference. With the help of the small test tasks offered in it, you can test yourself and once again make sure that you will not fall into the trap set by the English language, and if some cases cause you difficulty, the author’s answers and explanations will help you. Now a few words about how to study using the textbook. In most tasks, two sentences are contrasted with each other, sometimes differing only by one comma. Your task is to determine whether there is a difference between them, and if so, what is it? Most exercises are devoted to one or another grammatical phenomenon, but there are several exercises in which two words with similar meanings are contrasted. Unfortunately, there are not many exercises of the latter type, since this is already a topic for a separate manual. You will find the correct answer and the author's comment right under the task. The order in which you complete the tasks is not significant. You can do all the tasks either in a row or in any order, or take a closer look at a topic that interests you: tasks related to the topic are placed in close proximity. If, after some time, you begin to pay more attention to the construction underlying the English sentence, then this alone can give the author reason to consider the task that he has set himself to be completed. Anyone who has mastered the entire manual will not be afraid of any exams, be it the Unified State Exam, TOEFL or any other system for testing your knowledge. In a word, go for it!