Hi. The two words mean basically the same thing. You can use either word in most cases. For example: I shut the door. I closed the door. Another example: The factory has been shut down. The factory has been closed down. Sometimes there's a difference. For example: I need to close my bank account. You would not say I want to shut my bank account. I hope this helps...I'm not a teacher :-) But I am a native speaker.

Hi Ariane, Because of the history of Britain, we have a lot of 'double vocabulary' (sometimes even three or more words that are very similar). Most of the time, when we do have this double vocabulary, there is a word from the Romance languages (like French, Latin, etc.) and one from the German language (like German, Danish, Norwegian, etc.). That's the case here. 'Close' (as a verb) is from Old French, and 'shut' is Germanic. In this particular case, there is little difference between them, but 'close' is slightly more formal than 'shut'. As a few people have mentioned, there are particular collocations (words that usually come together) where you really need to use 'close' and others where you need to use 'shut'. You just have to learn these, there are no rules. Most of the time they are fairly interchangeable.

However, Both have a similar meaning, but there is also a little difference between these both, as "Shut" is always used for blocking or closing something such as something is open and you want to block it or close it, suppose that this is a door and you want to block it, then you can use in your sentence: " you shut the door " you shut it because it was open. In this way, you can use at any open place "Shut" to block it or close it. On the other side, "Close" is used to tell that something is near. For example, you want to say "Sam is very near to me" but instead of Near you can also mention there close as "Sam is close to me".

Nanren, "close off" is a phrasal verb that has a different meaning to both "close" and "shut". Same applies to "shut down".

Another counter example: Close the question when it is resolved. - ok Shut the question - not so good. . Maybe "shut" is restricted to things that move rather than figuratively close? . Close/shut a shop. Close/shut a window. Close off a job, account, project, (Though shut down can work for project)