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 giving something or someone the degree that they deserve or deserve. But this definition must be understood in a context specific to make full sense, and such a 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 criterion preset. For example, when we talk about adjusting the output of water in a pipe, we refer to limiting, moderating or refining the flow of the liquid so that it does not spurt or drip.
- Assign someone a level, rank or position within a pre-established system based on their performance. For example, when we talk about the graduation ceremony for 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 training 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 the Latin graduates, voice that can be translated 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 lower the degree of something”.
Therefore, the main uses of the word "graduation" in everyday life have to do with:
- Reach the end of an academic study and receive a title that accredits 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 gives us our master's degree in finance).
- Determine the military ranks, that is, the ranks of hierarchy formal that can be achieved within the military institution, such as captain, colonel, general, among others. For example: "Estevez was graduated from captain" (they granted him the rank of captain) or on the contrary: "López was demoted for misconduct" (that is, they lowered his rank).
- Determine the proportion of a substance in a mixture, such as the level of alcohol in alcoholic beverages or the purity level of a chemical. Thus, when we say that a beer has 6 alcoholic degrees, we are saying that there is 6% ethyl alcohol in the mixture that makes it up. The same applies to blood alcohol control: the level of alcohol in the body is measured to drivers to ensure that they do not violate the limit accepted as safe to drive a car.
- Determine the average difficulty of a sports 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 climbing, there is a gradation 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 a, b either c to establish distinctions of difficulty within the same step; while the Australian system grades the difficulty starting at 1 and ascending to infinity, with 34 being the highest degree that has been reached.