Oxford Dictionary of Sociology

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ability

ability
The power to perform a mental or physical task—either before or after training. Social psychologists usually distinguish ability from aptitude, the natural ability to acquire or learn a body of knowledge, sometimes measured by an aptitude test. Sociologists would probably distinguish ability and skill, the former being relatively specialized and task-specific, the latter referring to a wider set of learned techniques which could be applied to a number of cognate tasks.

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