Dependent Prepositions After Verbs in Technical English
5 exercises — memorizing the correct fixed preposition after common technical-writing verbs.
Key patterns:
rely on — depend on, never "rely of/to"
result in (cause → effect) vs. result from (effect ← cause) — opposite directions
comply with — the only correct preposition for this verb
attributed to / account for — fixed causal and proportional pairings
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A system design document states: "The billing service _____ the inventory service for real-time stock levels." Choose the correct verb-preposition pair for this sentence:
"Relies on" is the fixed verb-preposition pairing meaning "depends on for support or information." "Consists of" is a valid collocation but means "is made up of parts," which does not fit the meaning of one service depending on another for data. Prepositions after verbs are not predictable from meaning alone and must be memorized as fixed pairs — rely on, never rely of or rely to.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence with the correct dependent preposition after "result":
"Result in" means "cause/lead to" and is used when describing an effect, as in this sentence where the race condition is the cause of the corrupted record. "Result from" (option C) has the opposite direction of causality — it would mean the corrupted record caused the race condition, which contradicts "causing the bug" later in the same sentence. Result to and result with are not valid prepositional pairings in English.
3 / 5
A compliance document reads: "All vendors must _____ the data retention policy outlined in Section 4." Which verb-preposition pair correctly means "follow/adhere to"?
"Comply with" is the only correct preposition pairing for this verb in English; comply to, comply for, and comply on are all common errors made by learners whose first language uses a different preposition logic (e.g., some languages naturally pair the equivalent verb with "to"). This is a high-frequency collocation in compliance, legal, and security documentation, so getting the preposition wrong is a noticeable and recurring error.
4 / 5
An incident report states: "The outage can be _____ a misconfigured DNS record that propagated during the deployment." Which verb-preposition pair correctly attributes cause?
"Attributed to" is the fixed pairing used when assigning a cause or origin to an event — "X can be attributed to Y" means "Y is the cause of X." None of the other prepositions (with, for, on) form valid collocations with "attribute" in this passive causal sense. This pairing is extremely common in root-cause analysis and postmortem writing.
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses the dependent preposition after "account" in a monitoring/metrics context?
"Account for" means "make up a proportion of" or "explain," and is the only grammatically correct preposition choice with this verb in this sense. This collocation is common in metrics reporting and root-cause analysis ("X accounts for Y% of Z"), and should not be confused with unrelated fixed phrases like "take into account", which uses a different preposition structure entirely.