differencesmeaning
When it comes to "the level of importance", what is the difference between "urgent" and "critical"?
I have my own idea, but I recently came upon a scenario where the relative level of importance was reversed from my expectations. Thus, I'm looking for a standard/objective difference between the two.
Are you defining "geography" to encompass only natural phenomena such as the shape and location of landmasses and their features? Or are you including demographic and sociological factors like population density, literacy rate, and so forth?
If the former, consider something like geophysics (which would be better used in adjectival form, e.g. "geophysical factors") or physical topology.
If the latter, that's probably too broad a category to be considered as a single unit, although in a pinch you could resort to something unwieldy like "geographic and demographic factors."
In either case, "environment" should suffice as a contrasting category once you've differentiated it from the other one.
If you say when something happens, you imply it definitely will happen, even if the precise timing is unknown. You use if when there's uncertainty about whether the event will happen at all.
It's quite common — especially in informal contexts — to use when/if as a shorthand way of signifying when, but allowing for the possibility that the event in question may not in fact occur.
Personally I tend to use the composite when/if rather than if/when, for no reason I can clearly explain. I can't easily search for those hyphenated forms to check others' usage, but I can use NGram to check the more extended equivalents. This covers well over a million instances, so I think it's statistically significant. But I have no idea why three out of four people put them the opposite way round to me...
Best Answer
My take is that urgent expresses the time frame in which the requirement must be met (but does not speak to the severity of failing to met the requirement), while critical expresses the importance of meeting it (but not the deadline for doing so); that is, the two measures are orthogonal, and it is possible for a task to be urgent but not terribly important or to be critical but not yet pressing.