We explain what a graduation is when it refers to a measurement or control and when it refers to an objective or range achieved.
What is a graduation?
The word graduation can be understood as the action of give something or someone the degree they deserve or deserve. But this definition must be understood in a specific context to make full sense, and that context usually distinguishes between two main meanings:
- Control, determine or formalize the quality or proportion of something in the face of a regulation or a pre-established criterion. For example, when we talk about adjusting the flow of water in a pipe, we are referring to limiting, moderating or fine-tuning the flow of the liquid so that it does not come out in spurts or drips.
- Assigning someone a level, rank, or position within a pre-established system based on their performance. For example, when we talk about the graduation ceremony of university students, we are referring to the day on which they will formally receive their professional degrees and it will be publicly recognized that they have successfully completed their preparation in an area of human knowledge.
As we can see, in both cases It is about assigning something a place within a system, that is, determining its degree. This last word, from which “graduate” is derived, comes from Latin graduatea voice translatable as “step” or “step,” and conveys the idea that graduating is taking a step on a predetermined path. Similarly, the verb degrade It means “to decrease the degree of something.”
Therefore, the main uses of the word “graduation” in everyday life have to do with:
- Reach the completion of an academic study and receive a degree that certifies the knowledge obtained. For example: “Miguel graduated as a lawyer” (that is, he obtained a law degree) or “Tomorrow is the graduation of the master's degree in finance” (tomorrow an academic authority will give us our master's degree in finance).
- Determine military ranksthat is, the formal hierarchy ranks that can be achieved within the military institution, such as captain, colonel, general, among others. For example: “Estévez was graduated as captain” (they granted him the rank of captain) or on the contrary: “Lopez was demoted for bad behavior” (that is, his rank was lowered).
- Determine the proportion of a substance in a mixturesuch as the level of alcohol in alcoholic beverages or the purity level of a chemical substance. Thus, when we talk about a beer having 6 degrees of alcohol, we are saying that the mixture that makes it up contains 6% ethyl alcohol. The same applies to blood alcohol control: the level of alcohol in drivers' bodies is measured to ensure that they do not breach the limit accepted as safe for driving a car.
- Determine the average difficulty of a sporting action or an athletic challenge, based on a scale that contemplates the effort necessary to complete it and translates it into some type of signs. For example, in the sport of climbing, there is a grading of difficulty that assigns numbers to the increasing complexity of the mountains. These systems can vary from one country to another: the French system lists from 1 (very easy) ascending to 10 (extremely difficult and risky), also adding a letter to, b either c to establish distinctions of difficulty within the same step; while the Australian system grades the difficulty starting with 1 and ascending to infinity, with 34 being the highest level that has been reached.
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References
- “Graduation (disambiguation)” on Wikipedia.
- “Graduation Ceremony” in Wikipedia.
- “Graduate, graduate” in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts of the Royal Spanish Academy.
- “Etymology of Graduar” in the Online Spanish Etymological Dictionary.
