‘Fundamental’ means central or most basic.  It comes from the Latin word ‘fundamentum’ which means ‘foundation.’

Examples:

• Honesty, conscience and equity should be fundamental principles of any society.
• Communism and facism are fundamentally different approaches to organising a society.

Collocations: When you learn new vocab, make sure that you note collocations too. For this group of words some collocations are:
fundamental mistake, fundamental principles, fundamentally different
to generate a result, to generate an error, generation of electricity
generation gap, intergenerational report, generational differences
image of, image in
a liberal helping, a liberal sprinkling, a liberal attitude, liberal politics, apply liberally

Check the meanings of the words if you don’t already know them. Check the meanings of the various forms as sometimes they are different. You can check them at Time4english by clicking the words (http://www.time4english.com/aamain/lounge/awl.asp).

Academic Word List 54

Complete the sentences below with the correct form of the word. You MAY need to change the form of the word too (eg. liberal –> liberally / generation –> generations).

1. She adds  _______________ amounts of salt to her cooking? (liberal, generate)
2. Paul was haunted by the  _______________ of children crying while bombs dropped around them. (liberal, image)
3. The company made some  ______________ changes which meant that their training department expanded by several positions. (fundamental, generate)
4. Each  _______________ has different norms related to modesty and manners. (generation, generate)
5. The company undertook a huge advertising campaign to   _______________ interest in their new products. (generate, fundamental)

Answers (in the wrong order)
5. generate   1. liberal   2. image/images   3. fundamental    4. generation