vary significantly

09:47 Aug 26, 2014 

Personally, I'd rather rewrite the whole sentence. Putting the verb at the end every single time makes your text a dreary piece of writing. Just checked my sociology books here, and not one of the authors did that.

09:45 Aug 26, 2014 

It may be a bit clearer but what do you think of combinations such as "madeup story" or "cutthrough switch"? Mostly found in forum entries etc. today, not in dictionaries, of course.

To the asker's question:

As unfortunate of a trend as omitting hyphens can be nowadays, I personally believe the same is true for writing a text in science and using the same term but under different circumstances. If significant has a special meaning, it should refer to this specific meaning and not to everything because you can't think of another word right now. Actually, that was what one part of my studies was all about: not mixing up ordinary and scientific uses of a word just because it's convenient.

Consider the sentence from the question about "hot topic":
"Regional discrimination [...] has been a hot topic among Chinese educators and legal experts in recent years."

Now, this here is the next question by the same asker. Both sentences combined sound like they're part of an introductory statement or explanation. Thus, I wouldn't read too much into it (which I did not(!) say you did but that's how some of the other responses made it seem like).

07:06 Aug 26, 2014 

cut-off — I think the case for hyphenating is clearer-cut when the noun or adjective is derived from a separable phrasal verb in the first place: to cut off / to cut something off.

It is not a cas of obfuscating anything — it is simply important to understand whether the writer was using the word 'significantly' in it's technical meaning (as in statistics) or simply in its woollier meaning in everyday language.

06:12 Aug 26, 2014 

See also the reference I posted and the asker's other question about "hot topic":

I really like the note of caution in your answer. I am simply a bit puzzled as to why so many people seem to refer to statistical relevance here. Having read enough social science books in my life, I do know how scientists write, and sometimes it's just not pretty - I should point to our other discussion about energetic(al) here.

Now, I invite everyone to speculate here, but I don't see any reason to make the text more complicated than it should be.

The sentence basically says:

The quota system introduced by Chinese universities has made it necessary to adjust student cutoff scores for admission. These scores are much higher for provinces that have fewer universities.

Of course, you can supply the above statement with 5000 "statistics" - which would only obfuscate the fact that this is a simple observation.

By the way: cut-off/cutoff is another nice example for the discussion about hyphens :)

04:59 Aug 26, 2014 

In contrast to some calls for more context, it is really not hard to find the relevant information in no time: If you're OK with Wiki here, it will actually take you about 5 seconds.

"Regional Discrimination

A university usually sets a fixed admission quota for each province, with a higher number of students coming from its home province. As the advanced educational resources (number and quality of universities) are distributed unevenly across China, it is argued that people are being discriminated against during the admission process based on their geographic region. For example, compared to Beijing, Henan province has fewer universities per capita. Therefore, Henan usually receives fewer admission quotas compared with Beijing, which makes a significantly higher position among applicants necessary for a Henan candidate to be admitted by the same university than his Beijing counterpart. The unequal admission schemes for different provinces and regions might intensify competition among examinees from provinces with fewer advanced education resources."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Higher_Education_Entra...

16:20 Aug 25, 2014 

Context: The cutoff scores are the scores in the national college entrance examination. Thanks for asking.

15:50 Aug 25, 2014 

I think that it is unfortunate that the field for this question was changed from Social Sciences. If this is a Social Science text, then scores that "vary significantly" should definitely be understood as scores that have a statistically significant variation and that means that any substitution of the term "significant" would be a serious error. On the other hand, if it is "General Conversation ... " then any old sloppy substitution may be OK.

14:34 Aug 25, 2014 

And also, vary/variation and statistics/al/ally are strong collocations.

13:04 Aug 25, 2014 

Asker's text talks about a "province-based quota system" and also "cutoff scores", which tends to hint at a statistical context. In addition, Asker has already posted a number of questions on this same document that discuss comparative figures etc., further corroborating that assumption.

12:51 Aug 25, 2014 

This is the heading on this particular Kudoz question. In the asker's description, I did not see any specific reference to "statistics". Hence my "different" suggestion. Could the asker kindly clarify what sort of "variation" would be useful? Many thanks in advance!