TOEIC Link Employee Leave Request and Paid Time Off Vocabulary: The Cluster for Part 3, Part 4, and Part 7

In TOEIC Link, an employee wants time away from work. A manager and a staff member discuss whether a vacation request can be approved during a busy week (Part 3). A recorded HR announcement explains how many days carry over at year-end and by when unused leave must be used (Part 4). A leave-request form sits beside a company leave policy that states how much notice is required and who signs off (Part 7 double passage). Because a leave request always follows the same arc — the request, the balance check, the approval, the coverage — ETS can pair two documents and leave exactly one defensible answer. Miss a term like accrue, carry over, or cover a shift and you can lose a linked pair in a single move.

This article organizes the cluster by the leave-approval cycle — the request, the balance and policy, the approval, and the coverage — because that sequence is precisely how ETS threads the pieces together. If your general workplace base is thin, build it first with the TOEIC Link vocabulary essentials guide; this cluster layers on top. Leave and pay are tightly linked, so pair this with the payroll and timesheet approval cluster when the money side of time off is where you slip.

Why leave and PTO vocabulary is overweighted

Reason 1 — a request form plus a policy is a ready-made double passage. A form stating the dates an employee wants off, followed by a policy stating the rules that govern it, cross-reference each other perfectly. The request in one and the constraint in the other force a single conclusion — exactly what a linked set needs. ETS asks whether the request complies or must be changed, and only one reading survives.

Reason 2 — balances and deadlines create eligibility questions. Because time off depends on a running total — days accrued, days remaining, a use-it-or-lose-it deadline — ETS can ask "Why was the request denied?" or "How many days does the employee have left?" with exactly one correct answer. The reader has to match the situation against the stated numbers.

Reason 3 — the terms are fixed HR conventions. Accrue, carry over, and paid time off mean the same thing at nearly every organization. That rigidity makes the cluster perfectly testable — and perfectly learnable. The collocation, not the isolated word, is the unit of memory.

The cluster, organized by the leave-approval cycle

Stage 1 — the request

Verbs and collocations: submit a leave request, request time off, put in for vacation, give advance notice, fill out the form, specify the dates.

Nouns: leave request, time-off request, vacation, annual leave, sick leave, personal day, dates requested.

The exam rarely says "ask for a holiday." It says the employee will submit a leave request, put in for vacation, or request time off for specific dates. Train the paraphrase: "I'd like the 14th and 15th off" in a Part 3 conversation becomes "requested two days of leave" in the question stem.

Stage 2 — the balance and policy

Verbs and collocations: accrue leave, carry over unused days, use up your allowance, forfeit unused leave, meet the notice requirement, exceed the balance.

Nouns: paid time off (PTO), leave balance, accrual, allowance, entitlement, notice period, blackout period.

An employee does not merely "have days" — they accrue leave over the year and hold a leave balance. Part 7 loves the deadline: the policy says unused days must be taken by year-end or they are forfeited, and the memo reminds staff of a blackout period when no leave is granted. The question then asks what the employee must do before a specific date.

Stage 3 — the approval

Verbs and collocations: approve the request, deny the request, sign off on leave, grant time off, decline pending coverage, defer the decision.

Nouns: approval, manager, supervisor, HR department, confirmation, decision.

This is where the linked pair is decided. The policy says a request needs a manager's sign-off with two weeks' notice; the email says the employee applied three days out during a peak week. The correct answer is whether the request was approved or denied. Flip one variable — enough notice, no blackout — and the answer flips to "the request was approved." Watch pending: a request marked pending is neither approved nor denied, and often waits on coverage being arranged.

Stage 4 — the coverage

Verbs and collocations: arrange coverage, cover a shift, fill in for a colleague, delegate duties, hand over responsibilities, reschedule the workload.

Nouns: coverage, replacement, backup, handover, out-of-office, return date.

Coverage is the payoff of the whole chain. Distinguish the three outcomes ETS contrasts: a request is approved (leave granted and recorded), denied (rejected outright), or approved subject to coverage (conditional on someone filling in). A common trap reports that leave was "approved provided a colleague covers the desk" — a conditional grant the question specifically tests against a clean approval.

How ETS links the documents

The reason this cluster is worth a dedicated study session is that it is built for cross-referencing. In a Part 7 double passage you will typically see a leave-request form or email paired with the leave policy or a manager's reply. The single answerable question is almost always the same shape: given the request and the policy, was the time off granted, and under what condition?

Because the same vocabulary drives Part 3 workplace conversations and Part 4 HR announcements, studying it once pays off across three sections at the same time. When you can hear accrue, carry over, and cover a shift and instantly map them to a return date, the leave scenario stops being a reading puzzle and becomes a scan for the one date that matters.

Practice pattern

Take any leave-request email and its governing policy, then answer three questions before checking the options: How much notice was given? What is the leave balance? What condition, if any, is attached to the approval? If you can answer those three from the collocations alone, the cluster is doing its job. Rehearse the paraphrase pairs — request time off / apply for leave, carry over / roll unused days into next year, cover a shift / fill in — until the mapping is automatic. For the travel side of time off, continue with the travel booking and itinerary change cluster, where the same request-and-approval logic reappears around trips instead of days off.