SUCCESSFUL, SUCCESSIVE

INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL

Read and translate the following sentences paying special atten­tion to the words in bold type.

1. Rupert is a bit pleased with himself. Of course he’s got plenty to be pleased about, successful man, successful husband, I only wish he and Hilda wouldn’t put it on display quite so much. 2. Mr Smith’s intervention proved successful. 3. She, in the course of two marriages has made herself successful and secure.4. A farmworking couple who were thrown out of their cottage on Tuesday, later staged a successful sit-in at a council building as the first stage in their fight for a permanent home. 5. The successful launching by the Russians of the first space satellite in October 1957 posed many problems for the western nations, the least weighty of them being the actual naming in the various national languages of that epoch-making device. 6. The fact is that in some quarters the denunciation of Americanisms is a major hobby, and the correspondence columns of newspapers can always be relied on to provide criticism of the BBC along these lines. Indeed the BBC itself must be a linguistic battleground on occasions, if one is to judge by variants of vocabulary in successive readings of the news bulletins of a given day. 7. Last year researchers from Bonn University found fragments of dinosaur eggs in four successive layers of rock in Provence. 8. For two successive nights I kept an eye on that villa from the hedge opposite.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Successful adj. Coming about, taking place, or turning out to be as was hoped for; having a favourable result; achieving or having achieved success, e.g. a ~ mission, to be ~ in doing smth., a ~ man, to be ~ in everything.

Antonym: unsuccessful adj.

Derivatives: successfully adv., unsuccessfully adv.

Successive adj. Coming one after the other; following in order; consecutive, e.g. ~ ballots, the ~ strokes of a piston, the team won four ~ games.

Derivative: successively adv.

The meanings of successful (успешный, удачный, удачливый, преуспевающий) and succesive (последующий, следующий один за другим) are utterly different, but these adjectives are sometimes confused because of the identity of the root word. Remember that successful is correlated with success (успех, удача) while successive is correlated with succession (преемственность, последователь­ность, непрерывный ряд).