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Qualify and qualification can be used a number of ways: Qualified to vote. A qualified majority. Well qualified. Qualify as a solicitor. An unqualified legal opinion. The qualifications needed. What do these expressions mean?
qualified
More information on the words discussed in the video, including sound files, examples of usage, common mistakes and encyclopaedic information, can be found in TransLegal's Legal English Dictionary.
Hello, I'm Robin and this is TransLegal's lesson of the week and today we're going to talk about the word qualify and its noun form, qualification.
Qualify has several meanings. The first one, best known one is to provide with the necessary skills, knowledge or credentials. So for instance:
"I like to think that I am well qualified for my job as a lawyer-linguist because I have a Bachelors in Linguistics and a law degree".
We can also say, in the UK:
"law students then qualify as a solicitor after they have achieved all of the necessary knowledge by taking courses and the appropriate tests to become a solicitor and then the Law Society admits them because they have the appropriate skills, knowledge and credentials".
A qualified voter is one who meets the necessary residence, age and registration requirements for voting.
Now, another important meaning is to limit or to restrict, so we would say for instance, "the general rule is qualified by exceptions".
We often talk about a qualified majority, which is a majority which is larger than the usual fifty or fifty-one percent majority, in some cases it's sixty percent, in some cases it's seventy-five percent, and in fact qualified majority voting is the most common form of voting in the EU Council of Ministers. In that case, it requires 345 votes, but as you understand, a qualified majority is some sort of exception to the normal majority rule.
We also talk about, for instance, an unqualified legal opinion. By that we do not mean an opinion which is given by a bad lawyer, but we mean an opinion which has no exceptions or reservations or exemptions.
We also have the noun form, qualification, and that has both of the same meanings that the verb does. For instance, we say that "a general rule has no qualifications if it's an absolute rule" and as I like to say about myself again, "I have all of the qualifications needed for my job".
I hope that this video has given you some of the qualifications you need for your job, that you have acquired some of the necessary skills and knowledge that you need and with that I'll say goodbye. Please leave your comments in the box below. Thank you.
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