Because the mid-to high-energy regions are close to the excitation energies of water this is expected. The peak positions at 5.0 eV and 5.9 eV are well-reproduced for the neutral solute (Figure ) with a 0.1 eV shift observed for the high-energy peak at 6.7 eV. For the anionic solute (Figure ) the low-lying peak at 3.3 eV is observed be to shifted by an equal amount (+0.1 eV) as observed in Figure when using the M2P2 potential. This could indicate, as stated before, an over-polarization that cannot be ameliorated by using an exciton model for this particular system. Computing the deviation from the reference spectrum (see Table ) also confirms that the behavior is more like the small QM region with a deviation of 0.64. Either damping of the induced moments or the WAT potential (as was observed in Figure ) could be employed for a better result. Similarly, both CHCl 3 (Figure ) and DMSO (Figure ) systems are observed to display an accuracy that lies between small and large QM regions presented above. Absorption spectra for solutes 1 and 2 in CHCl 3 are presented in Figure . Here, it is observed that for solute 1 the accuracy is more similar to the results obtained for the small QM region, emphasizing that other inter-molecular interactions than the solute-solvent Coulomb interaction are responsible for the considerable improvement observed for the large QM region (Figure ). This is also confirmed when computing the deviations in spectra from the reference where 0.44 and 0.29 are obtained using eq 13. A similar conclusion is obtained for solute 2 in CHCl 3 . For solute 1 in DMSO, there is an overall good agreement with the reference spectrum in both the low-and high-region of the spectrum. As was observed for water, however, solute 2 shows a minor shift (<0.1 eV) of the major peak at 3.2 eV which again must be contributed to a polarization effect. The remaining spectrum is represented with good accuracy both the small peak around 4.0 eV and the slightly larger peak at 5.1 eV. The deviations for solute 1 and 2 are, respectively, 0.26 and 0.56. The latter result is about a factor of two worse than purely using the small QM region (0.24) but the deviation stems mostly from the slight shift in the major absorption peak and the increase in absorption from 5.3 eV to 6.0 eV. In Based on the analysis above it is clear that adequate results, when compared to much larger reference calculations, can be obtained both with the traditional PE-TDDFT approach using large QM regions (models W3, C2 and D2) or with the exciton approach.