care factor
- noun
- /kɛr ˈfæktər/
- US
:
nivel de interés
- The team's care factor for the project was evident when they missed multiple deadlines without explanation.
Examples
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Care factor
Blog text (27) -
He showed a low care factor about the outcome of the game, preferring to focus on other things.
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She has a very high care factor for environmental issues, always volunteering for clean-up events.
How Caring
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is partly derivable from its parts: 'care' (concern) combined with the pattern 'X factor' suggests an amount or element related to care, so a learner can guess it relates to how much someone cares. However, the precise sense of 'degree of interest' (and the pragmatic nuance 'often implying little or none') is not fully predictable from the literal definitions and relies on knowledge of the idiomatic use of 'X-factor' in English, making it only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Care factor comes from putting care (how much you care about something) together with factor (a number or part that measures things), creating the image of a simple measure of caring. Think of it as a score or meter that goes up when someone cares and down when they do not, so the phrase means the 'degree of interest or concern' someone has, often very low.