clear away & tidy up

Shiyuan said:

Hi!
I did such found a test a question (source required), and it gose goes like this:

"After the guests left, she spend hald half an hour ____ the sitting room."
A. ordering
B. arranging
C. tidying up
D. clearing away

I picked C and its it was corrrect correct, but after searching for the meaning of "clear away", I still don't know why it is wrong.
So Is there any slight a difference between these two phrases? How can I correctly distinguish between them in the an exam?

Ps:
PS: The meaning of "clear up": to make a place look tidier by removing things or putting things back where they belong
tidy up: to make a place look tidy

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emsr2d2 said:

Please note my corrections and comments above. Please make sure you provide the source and author of the question. You can either edit post #1 to add the information or provide it in a response to this post.

"Clearing away" doesn't work because that refers to the specific items that you pick up and move during the process. You can clear away plates, cups, cutlery, books, toys etc, but you can't clear away a sitting room - that would suggest you picked up the sitting room and moved it.
If D had been "clearing up", it would have worked.

Tidying up = clearing up
Neither of them mean the same as "clearing away".

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Shiyuan said:

Thank you soooo so much for your corrections! I made a lot of careless spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes in this that paragraph post.

And The test is from the Inner Mongolia University's postgraduate examination in of 2011.

Thank you very much! Unnecessary repetition

Best wishes! Unnecessary

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