Vocabulary in context Lesson 20 of the english course of Mova's primary school: 19 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 You do not need to know every word to understand a text. 1 When you meet a new word, read the words around it: they are its context, and they leave clues. 2 «The children were famished after the long walk.» After a long walk you are hungry, so famished must mean very hungry. 3 That is exactly what it means. 4 «The path was treacherous, full of loose stones and steep drops.» Leo guesses treacherous means pretty, but the clues are loose stones and steep drops, so it must mean dangerous. 5 Always ask: what word would fit here? 6 Then try your meaning in the sentence instead of the hard word and see if it still makes sense. 7 Words also carry feelings. 8 «He gave a curt reply and walked away.» Curt means short, but the walking away tells you it was short in a rude, unfriendly way. 9 «The dog's tail drooped» is not just about a tail moving down: it shows the dog is sad or tired. 10 Glum, sad, miserable and heartbroken all mean unhappy, but each a different amount. 11 Words from other places work the same way. 13 An Aussie mum says, «The servo's closed, love», and Ella in London has to work it out: a servo is a petrol station. 14 When context is not enough, a dictionary settles it. 15 Context means the words and sentences around a word. 16 Context clues can help you work out the meaning of an unknown word. 17 A good check is to swap your meaning into the sentence and see if it still makes sense. 19 «Treacherous» means dangerous, especially when it looks safe. 26 You can understand a text well without knowing every word; skip, read on, then come back. ← previous Prediction: what happens nextnext → Author's choices: why this word, why this way↑ back to English This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/20-vocabulary-in-context/