Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Lesson 448. .
The title of today's lesson is the difference between grave
and serious and we're looking at them both as adjectives. And
sometimes students are confused, they may say like when should I use grave and when should
I use serious. Okay. So let's take a look at the note
here. If someone says that something is grave, it means that it
is extremely or deeply serious because it may lead to
ending somebody's life . You know, it may, may hurt
damage your happiness, freedom, loss of income etc.
If something is grave, it makes people worry. So that's an important part.
If it doesn't make people worry, you probably shouldn't
be using grave. Okay. Let's continue. If we say that something is serious,
it can mean that it is not funny or not humorous. This is a situation where
you probably wouldn't use grave. You just say that it's serious,
meaning that it's not funny or simply to stress the importance of
the need to pay attention. Now this is more
general. So to be honest with you, most situations that you could use grave
you could also use serious, although grave has a deeper
meaning and a stronger meaning. But in a lot of those same situations
serious could be used. Now if you go the other way around,
no. That may not be true. There are other situations where you can use
serious where grave is not really suitable. All right. Let's continue. So
again here with the X of course that's, this is wrong. So the
first example. The plots of dramas are grave.
No. This sounds weird. You should say the plots of dramas
are serious. All right. So here you just mostly mean that it's it's not funny.
It's not that funny. So you shouldn't be using grave for that. You should just say
that it's a, it's a they are serious. So they're serious in
the sense that they don't make you laugh. It's not funny. It's not humorous. All
right. The second one here. I didn't have many grave problems on my
first day at work. Well hopefully you shouldn't have grave problems that ...
they sound too deep, too serious for a first day of work. You know,
hopefully nobody's going to die or be injured or something like that. So
here serious should be used. I didn't have many
serious problems on my first day of work. Okay. Good.
All right. Now let's look at the the next examples. Most of these next examples
you probably could use either grave or serious.
But it might, may be a slightly different feel ,
depending on which one you use. So let's look at the first one. If a pharmacist
mixes up which medication to give a patient
it can have serious consequences or it can have grave consequences.
Now if you say it can have grave consequences this
might suggest more that you know maybe, maybe (if) the person takes the wrong
medicine maybe they might die. You know maybe it may not mix well they
might be seriously hospitalized. So this is what we mean by grave here.
Now if you say it may have serious consequences. It
sounds like the pharmacist can still get into a lot of trouble , but
it just may not be you know it's not as bad as grave. All right.
Let's continue. The conflicts and tensions are building
between these two countries. It's a matter of
grave concern or it's a matter of serious concern.
So neither one is completely wrong. Grave sounds more serious.
Grave sounds like you know maybe, maybe they may
start a war. You know, serious still sounds bad.
You know, maybe maybe it'll just be I don't know trade conflict or something.
Okay. Anyway, let's continue. It is a grave situation.
They are not sure if they can dig those miners out in time. So again this could
be ... this could lead to somebody losing their
life. So here's one where we would probably
use grave more. Could you say it's a serious situation ? Yeah. That wouldn't
be wrong, but grave might be better because again
somebody's life could be threatened or endangered.
That hospital made a grave mistake. Okay.
And amputated the wrong patient's foot. Yeah. I've heard of
cases like this where somebody made a mistake . They looked at the wrong chart
they took the wrong patient. They would be sued for a lot of money if
they did this but it's still a very very serious mistake.
Okay. Good. So again and we use grave with words like some of the ones I used in the
examples. We often say like grave mistake, grave situation,
grave concern. These are ones where we often hear the word " grave"
used with. Okay. Anyway, I hope you got it I hope you get a better sense and a
better feel of when you know, when it might be best
to use grave and and in most of these cases you could
probably use serious. Okay. Anyway , I hope it was informative.
Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.