The Chinese Synonyms P6 Papers Ask Children to Swap

Word-substitution questions give your child a sentence with one word underlined and ask which option means the same. They look like vocabulary questions. They are really about precision: the child usually knows all four options, and has to judge which one fits this sentence.

We counted the words tested this way across 266 different P6 Chinese prelim papers from Singapore's top primary schools, 2021 to 2025, merging the substitution and synonym question types.

About the data: 266 P6 prelim papers set in-house by top primary schools, 2021–2025. Not SEAB's actual PSLE papers, and no exam text is reproduced — only counts.

The most-tested words

The list is really a handful of clusters

A flat frequency list hides the most useful thing in this data. 立刻 and 马上 both appear ten times, and they are two halves of one pair. Setters test synonyms in families, and revising them in families is far more efficient than working down a list.

Speed: 立刻, 马上, 迅速

立刻 and 马上 both mean immediately and are interchangeable in most sentences, with 立刻 slightly more written. 迅速 is different in kind: it describes the speed of an action, not how soon it starts. A child who treats all three as one word will get the 迅速 questions wrong.

Attitude to work: 认真, 专心

认真 is about care and thoroughness — doing something properly. 专心 is about attention — not being distracted. A child can be 专心 and still careless, which is exactly the distinction these questions probe.

Facing a difficulty: 困难, 克服, 拖延, 抱怨

This cluster carries the moral arc of almost every prelim passage: there is a 困难, and the character either 克服 it, 拖延 dealing with it, or 抱怨 about it. All four are in the top sixteen, and all four appear in every one of the five years.

Reacting to other people: 佩服, 嘲笑

Opposite reactions, tested from both directions. 佩服 is admiration with a note of respect for effort. 嘲笑 is mockery. Both turn up when a passage describes how classmates responded to someone.

Why children lose these marks

Almost never because they do not know the word. Two other reasons account for most of it.

1. They match on meaning and ignore fit. Two words can share a dictionary definition and still not swap into the same sentence. The question is testing the second thing.
2. They pick the word they would use in speech. 马上 sounds more natural to most Singapore children than 立刻, so it gets chosen even when the sentence is written in a formal register.

The fix follows from that: practise substitution, not definition. Give your child a sentence, hand them a synonym, and ask them to swap it in and read the result aloud. When the swap is wrong, it usually sounds wrong — but only if they hear it in a full sentence.

A shortcut worth knowing: for any word in the table above, learning its cluster costs barely more than learning the word alone, and covers several questions instead of one.