The half you cannot guess: expressions about the body, weather and money
Could you give me a hand with these boxes, and keep an eye on the door while I am upstairs?
The venue cost an arm and a leg, and two of the organisers got cold feet a week before the conference.Each sentence below is missing one word from a fixed expression. In every case the gap falls on the word you could not have worked out from the meaning, while the words that are easy to supply have been left in place. Write the missing word only, in the form the sentence requires. If an ordinary alternative seems to fit the sense perfectly, treat that as a warning rather than an encouragement: it is almost certainly not the answer.
1. The organisers will ___ the bill for travel, so you only need to pay for your own meals.
2. Her wages barely cover the rent, and she has been struggling to make ___ meet since April.
3. Nobody was hurt and the repair took an hour, but the local paper turned it into a storm in a ___.
4. I cannot manage Thursday, but could I take a ___ check and come the week after instead?
5. With both grants gone, the whole team had to ___ their belts for the rest of the year.Show the answers
1. foot
2. ends
3. teacup
4. rain
5. tightenIn every item the gap falls on the word that carries none of the meaning, because that is the word a learner cannot reconstruct. Item one is the clearest case: the ordinary verb for settling an account fits the sense perfectly and is what most people write, yet the fixed version uses a quite different verb, one with no connection to paying at all. In item two the noun stays bare and plural, with no article and no possessive, and a singular form is the usual slip. Item three fixes the container, and the American version of the same expression uses a different one, so learners who have met that variety supply it with confidence. Items four and five gap the half that is frozen rather than the half that hints at the sense.