. Desert has limited use; it means to leave a cause, a country or an army, often in order to join the opposing cause, country, or army. It is also used of abandoning a marriage.
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I saw an expression “to quit one’s job” which, I presume, might be applied to “school” either.
Mr. Google says that odds are in “leave school” favour (1,160,000 for “leave school”, 490,000 for “quit school” and only 76,700 for “desert school”)
I’m totally confused… Maybe someone could shed light upon it, please
A word of warning! Google can often give examples based on what someone somewhere has said or written but if you want to know which word couplings are most common and most readily used and understood, it’s better to rely on what information you can get from native speakers of the language and Mister Micawber has already offered that information above.
Well, you could get that information using a corpus consisting of texts written by native writers. I am sure you would find some “odd” combinations if you did that.
Apparently the test was mistakenly programmed with ‘desert’ as the correct answer (back in 2005). As is made clear by MM’s post, ‘desert’ is not really appropriate in this context. The programming error has since been corrected and if you do this test now, the “correct correct answer” is given: ‘quit’.
The word ‘leave’ doesn’t work as well since ‘leave’ is often used to describe a usual or normal end of schooling – e.g. graduation. The way the sentence is worded suggests a voluntary and premature end to schooling, so ‘quit’ is the best choice.
English Language Proficiency Tests, Advanced Level
