I need some help! I've found this sentence in my CAE book. There was a word missing, I wrote "took". My answer was correct. In my opinion John needed a lot of courage to sing that time. However, the answer key says that the answer is "took" because it's a collocation.
"John remembers that it took quite a lot of courage to sing in public for the first time."
I've looked for the collocation in Macmillan's dictionary and I've found this.
"take courage from something:
to feel more confident and hopeful because of something
We can take courage from his success"
I think that this is not the correct collocation… Could anyone explain to me if I was right or wrong and why?
Thank you!
Best Answer
This question isn't about the relationship between take and courage. There's no special idiom or collocation involving these two words. What we have is a type of construction:
The meaning is something along the lines of It required X to achieve Y. This is the same construction we use for explaining how much time something took:
The construction is quite interesting, in that the semantic subject has been replaced by "it" and pushed to the end of the sentence. Consider this sentence:
This sentence is a tiny bit stilted in English. It's perfectly grammatical though. Here we have a Verb Phrase To sing in public for the first time which is functioning as Subject. Took, of course is the Predicator, or verb, and quite a lot of courage, a Noun Phrase, is functioning as Direct Object.
In English we aren't very keen on having infinitive constructions as Subjects, especially very long infinitive constructions. So what we can do to fix this, is insert a dummy subject it, and move the infinitive to the end of the sentence:
Here are some more example sentences: