Dealing with new words (1)

A: Introduction
Some students believe that they cannot understand a text unless they check every unknown word in a dictionary. This makes reading very slow, but research has shown that this approach can also make it more difficult to understand a text!

One possible way to deal with unknown words is to simply ignore them! In fact, that is exactly what happened in the reading activities above. Ten of the most difficult words in the text were removed and replaced with a blank (______). The aim was to show you that you could still understand the general idea and many of the main points in the text.

However, ignoring unknown words is not always enough. Sometimes, we have to think about the words and try to ‘guess’ their meaning. Sometimes this is impossible, but often we can use the rest of the text (the context) to help us. Often, even having a general idea of the meaning of the word is enough. We will now see two examples of guessing the meaning of unknown words from context.

Example 1
In the sentence below:

I went to the market and bought some apples, some bananas and some kumquats.

you should be able to guess that ‘kumquat’ is something you buy in a market, and probably some type of fruit. You don’t need to know exactly what it is to understand this sentence.

Example 2
In the sentence:

The weather is very changeable in Britain. Yesterday it was quite cold, but today it’s absolutely scorching.

the word ‘but’ tells us there is a contrast with the word cold, so it must mean something like ‘warm’ or ‘hot’. We also know that the word ‘absolutely’ goes with strong adjectives, so ‘scorching’ must mean ‘hot’.