I can’t believe I need to explain “unknown” versus “unaware” to you

I wouldn’t have believed it if I had told myself a few years ago that I needed to explain the difference between “unknown” and “unaware”. Yeah! I was pretty ignorant back then. I was unaware of the differences in our education and your backgrounds were unknown to me.

But, for some reason, in the past few days, I’ve evaluated at least 6 writings that contained mistakes about “unknown” and “unaware”. Three of my clients didn’t know the difference between these words. So, here I am explaining the difference to you to help you avoid making silly mistakes with these words. There is a quiz at the end of this post so make sure you do it.

My client wrote: I have never been to Canada so I’ll be completely unknown about everything.

Did you see any mistakes? I can see at least 2 mistakes in this sentence.

“Unknown” versus “unaware”

Examples:

✅ The exact number of people carrying the virus is unknown.

✅ As recently as six months ago her name was almost unknown in this country.

✅ Unknown TO me, she’d organized a party for my birthday.

Examples:

✅ [ + that ] He was unaware that the police were watching him.

✅ I was completely unaware of the problem.

✅ I was unaware of the risks involved.

Quiz time!

Did you see the mistakes in the sentence above yet? Leave your answer in a comment.

To help you make sure you won’t make mistakes with these words, I have a quiz for you.

Check out which Practice9’s services fit you and your needs the most here.

Feel free to contact us for better guidance on your IELTS journey.

Don’t waste your time on IELTS! You can get it this time.

Have fun learning!

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Huyen Nguyen

Founder of Practice9, creator of IELTS with Huyen. Huyen has 10 years of experience with IELTS, overall 8.5.

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