Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from O'K Sinan. Hi, O'K, I hope I said your name, right?

O'Kays says, award and reward have similar meanings. What is the difference? Thank you. Great question. Award and reward. These two words can be

used as both nouns and verb. So let's break them down one by one. First, let's talk about reward.

Let's talk about this as a noun. A reward is something we get in return for doing something else.

So, for example, if you help your friend move into a new apartment, they might give you a reward.

For example, they might buy you pizza, or they might buy you something, or give you some money even, perhaps, in exchange for helping them.

We can understand this as a reward. Or for example, if you see somebody

posting like a missing sign, like maybe someone's cat is missing, it might say on that poster

where they're talking about the details of their missing cat, reward $100. So this means in

exchange for finding my missing cat, I will give you this money.

So we're talking about some kind of exchange of services or maybe some kind of exchange of

goods, I suppose, in some cases.

But generally, when we do something for someone else, they might hopefully give us a reward

in exchange for that thing. We can use the verb form of

reward in the same way. So for example, I found my neighbor's cat and he rewarded me with $100.

Or I helped my friend move into her new apartment and she rewarded me with pizza and beer. It was a

great time. So we use reward to talk about these kinds of transactions, right?

These kinds of doing good things in exchange for getting something else.

So whether or not you do the good thing just for the reward is a different conversation,

but this is what reward means.

Let's compare this then to the word award. So let's talk about this as a noun to begin with.

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