What's the difference between "drop significantly" and "drop drastically"?
Native speaker’s answer
Rebecca
Great question. The words "significantly" and "drastically" are similar in meaning. Often, you could use them interchangeably and just pick the one that you prefer. Ex: The house looks significantly different than it did ten years ago = The house looks drastically different than it did ten years ago. The above examples have, essentially, the same meaning with only very slight differences in the intensity or impact of the chosen word, so you could use whichever one you wanted. However, sometimes you might want to be precise and choose a specific one of them. In that case, we would use "drastically" when we want to emphasize urgency or how quickly something happened. Ex: The news drastically affected the company's profits. However, we would use "significantly" to emphasize the size (or amount) of an action. Ex: My father is significantly better at chess than I am.
