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Which of the following is more commonly heard?

It is easy for children to be addicted to video games.

It is likely for children to be addicted to video games.

It is easy for accidents to happen during a speedy car ride.

It is likely for accidents to happen during a speedy car ride.

(These are stand-alone sentences, with no other context. )

A teacher, who is not a native speaker of English, cautioned against using easy in these two contexts because they are not disucssing the difficulty of performing a task, but the likelihood of an event happening.

However, I feel that easy is not only valid, but might even be more common in these two sentences. I feel that a sentence in a Longman dictionary uses easy in the same way: It would have been easy for the team to lose the game.

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    Either word sounds wrong with "...for children to be addicted", because to be describes a state. The sentence would be more fluent with "... become addicted."
    – stangdon
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 14:00
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    Easy doesn't have to describe things you are trying to do. It can refer to accidents that can readily happen if a person is not taking care.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 14:41
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    The construction: It is likely for..... is a most unlikely way to start sentences such as those above. The idiomatic construction would be: Accidents are likely to happen / Children are likely to become. This is not true, however, for sentences starting: It is easy.... You might well hear:: **It is easy for someone to get through your window.""
    – Ronald Sole
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 15:28
  • @RonaldSole This is very interesting. I googled and found another teacher caution against It is likely for in this webpage. usingenglish.com/forum/threads/… However, I also found ludwig.guru/s/it+is+likely+for with sentences like "it is likely for abuses of power to occur." from The Guardian.
    – joy2020
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 23:57

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To answer your question, easy is an appropriate choice of words, as is likely. They are interchangeable in this context.

Your sentences, however, are a little awkward in American English. I would rewrite the first two as:

It is easy for children to become addicted to video games.

It is likely that children will become addicted to video games.

There are other variations possible, for example, you can say "might become" instead of "will become."

In the second two sentences, if there is an accident, it's not the car ride that causes it, it's the excessive speed of the car that causes the accident. So you wouldn't make the car ride the subject of the second part of the sentence (and you wouldn't describe a car ride as "speedy"). You would probably say:

It's easy for accidents to happen or It's likely for accidents to happen:

  • when you're going fast
  • when you're driving fast
  • when the car is going fast
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