Believer wrote:

Hi, Can you help me to better use or correctly use the words 'various' and 'different'. It gets to be confusing when they both seem to be good in certain sentential contexts. need advice from various groups/different groups of people from various levels/different levels of academic backgrounds have choices to make from various fresh/different fresh fruit products    Do you have some tips?

One difference may be that "various" tends to be used with plural nouns. "different" can be used with a singular noun, though.

a different way of doing this

but not

a various way of doing it

to make it short: "varius" means "many different".

• I use various when the sense is vague, it is not known or there is no need or intention to know how many are there, e.g. People from various countries attended the conferece...in this case use of 'different' would be wrong..countries are different. Also, in this context it is not important how many countries. Various suggests loose control over the subject.
• I use different when we are talking about a set of distinct entities, whose count is known or should be known e.g. We provide different services to suit your needs...If I say 'We provide various services..' it feels like we are not sure ourselves how many services we are providing.

For your examples, I would suggest:

1. Need advice from different groups ( if the sense is to gather advice from distinct known groups of people)
2. from various levels of academic backgrounds (academic backgrounds can be so many...not possible to know how many levels and combinations are there.)
3. have choices to make from various fresh fruit products (again, the embasis is we do care about the total number of products available..but we have to choose from 'many'.)

Regards,

Uttam Shukla
India

1. have choices to make from various fresh fruit products (again, the embasis is we do NOT care about the total number of products available..but we have to choose from 'many'.)