Awareness of/about

[APARIDA]

Hi,

I came across this question in MGMAT CAT1. Out of the following two answers, I picked the first one and it turned out to be wrong.

- has increased awareness about pending environmental legislation
- has increased awareness of pending environmental legislation

When I searched the phrase "awareness about" in popular news sites e.g time.com, http://www.chicagotribune.com etc, I found number of web pages with this phrase. Please confirm whether or not "awareness about" is correct.

Thanks in advance

[priyankur.saha]

"Awareness of" is the correct usage.

[JonathanSchneider]

"Awareness of" is indeed prefered.

[d_taneja]

"awareness about" and "awareness of" both are correct idioms so no dispute that one is wrong and one is right.. Even preference is also not the case but this all depends on the requirement of sentence



awareness about --> To spread/distribute information about something

> Thousands run to raise awareness about cancer in US/India

> Building public awareness about smoking



awareness of --> Have little knowledge of somethinh

The public has little awareness of engineering





U can just replace awareness with knowledge -->



But in this sentence

"environmental organizations, homeowners, and small business owners have increased awareness (knowledge) of pending environmental legislation"


"environmental organizations, homeowners, and small business owners have increased awareness (knowledge) about pending environmental legislation"


What do u think that what should be correct

[RonPurewal]

"awareness about" and "awareness of" both are correct idioms so no dispute that one is wrong and one is right.. Even preference is also not the case but this all depends on the requirement of sentence



awareness about --> To spread/distribute information about something

> Thousands run to raise awareness about cancer in US/India

> Building public awareness about smoking



awareness of --> Have little knowledge of somethinh

The public has little awareness of engineering





U can just replace awareness with knowledge -->



But in this sentence

"environmental organizations, homeowners, and small business owners have increased awareness (knowledge) of pending environmental legislation"


"environmental organizations, homeowners, and small business owners have increased awareness (knowledge) about pending environmental legislation"


What do u think that what should be correct

with "HAVE awareness", only "of" is acceptable. you can't "have awareness about" something; that's not idiomatic.

in general, "awareness about" is questionable from the standpoint of formal language; it should be replaceable by "awareness of" + SPECIFIC TERM(S).
for instance:
"awareness about smoking" --> what does this mean? this is totally unclear. way too vague for formal language.
"awareness of the health problems caused by smoking" --> now this is good.

"awareness about cancer" --> again, this doesn't really mean anything specific.
"awareness of the incidence of / of the causes of / of the risk factors for cancer" --> better.

i would not pick any choice with "aware(ness) about".

[kritis686]

do we have any OG questions that actually test this? This was a very question one in my mgmat CAT.

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

I've done a quick search of OG 2020 and some other sources and I can't find this idiom tested in any problems. The problem with learning idioms is that there are so many that it's very unlikely that you'll see the same idiom repeated in future problems.

For that reason, if English isn't your first language I would encourage you to focus on other topics (such as parallelism and modifiers). In addition, most students actually know more idioms than they think they do, but have trouble accessing that information. Taking some examples of familiar language and examining how we use words and phrases to unpick the 'rules' is a skill that you can practice. After all, it's not as if Ron sat down and memorized the rules for using the word awareness - he simply reflected on examples that he's heard or read.