Spelling in business correspondence
Three words are shown and you decide which one is misspelled — or that none of them is. That last option is not a safety net. It is a real answer, and a candidate who never picks it is giving marks away.
- Words shown
- Three
- Fourth option
- None of them is misspelled
- Vocabulary
- Words used in written business communications
The fourth option is a real answer
The guide's own description is explicit: one of the three choices MAY contain a misspelled word, and if none does you choose the fourth option. That word 'may' is doing real work. Some items have no misspelling at all.
The practical consequence is that finding a suspect is not the end of the job. You still have to rule the other two out, because the alternative to your suspect is not another word — it is the possibility that everything on the page is correct.
Where business misspellings actually live
The words are the ones that turn up in letters and forms, and the errors are the ones people really make. Most of them are in the last third of the word: -ance against -ence, -able against -ible, -ment against -mant. A good few turn on a doubled letter, which is why accommodate, occurrence and unnecessary are perennial.
An unfamiliar word is not a wrong word. A long or technical-looking term is the thing candidates reach for when they are unsure, and reaching for it is how a correctly spelled word gets marked as an error.