improve
part of speech
verb (improve, improves, improved, improving); noun: improvement
meaning for a pupil
1) To make something better (improve your handwriting). tree →
2) To get better (her reading improved). tree →
3) Improve on: to do better than before. tree →
sense in the lessons
At school it is used for learning and feedback: «How can you improve this?», «Your spelling has improved». Teachers set targets for improving. In science, you improve an experiment to make it fairer or more accurate. In health: sleep, food and exercise improve your mood and fitness. In maths, a score that improves goes up. Phrases: improve on, improve your skills, room for improvement, much improved.
examples
- You can improve your story by adding more adjectives. tree →
- My times tables have really improved this term. tree →
- How could we improve our experiment? tree →
- The weather improved in the afternoon. tree →
- Practise every day to improve your swimming. tree →
- She improved on her best time by two seconds. tree →
- Eating well can improve how you feel. tree →
- Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.” tree →
note
Noun: improvement (an improvement, improvements). «Improve on» = beat a previous result. In maths problems: «improved by 5 points» means the new score = old score + 5.
In the corpora
- Getting feedback on your own work, then improving it yourself, is a good use if your school allows it.
- Some apps use what people type to train and improve their AI, so type as if someone else might read it.
- After a show the director gives praise and notes, small changes to make it better next time; good work can still improve.
- Useful feedback is kind, specific and helpful: it names something that works and one clear thing to improve.
- A draft is a version of your work that you plan to improve.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «improve» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.