Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder

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本书为98年reprint。 Unit 23 第2组quizzes B部分词汇august, auxiliary, augment, authorize，均未在本单元中出现，其中auxiliary可参见Unit 7 pp.135 peripheral第二条释义。 应该是词根auto与aug混淆了，好奇写作过程中是如何发生这种错误的，希望新版中已经改掉了，改日去书店验证一下。 至于以上四个词，可以参见 http://www.alphadictionary.com/goodword/word/august 该页面Word History一段摘录如下: You probably would not think of a nickname as anything august but these two words share their origin. Today's Good Word goes back 5000-6000 years to Proto-Indo-European *aug- "to increase". Latin retained the form intact in words like augere "to increase", which underlies our borrowed words augment and auction. Latin auxilium (aug-silum) "aid, support" came to us, via French, as auxiliary. The Germanic languages did not keep the PIE root intact. As it wound its way through the ancient Germanic languages it became Old English eacan "to add, increase". Today that word is eke. Now, a nickname started out centuries ago as an ekename "an additional name", but that N on the "an" changed partners along the way to become a nekename and one to nickname.

1. Bene: well

✅ benediction

✅ benefactor : a benefactor may be involved in almost any field. One may endow a scholarship fund; another may give money to expand a library; still another may leave a generous sum to a hospital in her will.

✅ beneficiary : the beneficiary of one’s life insurance; a college may be the beneficiary of a private donation; your uncle’s will may make a church his beneficiary. 🔺In a more general way, a small business may be a beneficiary of changes to the tax code.

✅ benevolence

2. Am: to love

✅ amicable: often describes relations between two groups, or especially two nations. So we often speak of an amicable meeting or an amicable settlement. When amicable describes more personal relations, it may indicate a rather formal friendliness.

✅ enamored: (enamored of/with) we often use the word in negative contexts.

✅ amorous: the word is often used a bit sarcastically, as when a tabloid newspaper gets hold of some scandalous photos and calls the participants “the amorous pair”.

✅ paramour: today it tends to refer to the lover of a married man or woman, but may be used for any lover who isn’t obeying the social rules.

3. Bell: war

✅ antebellum: often summons you images of ease, elegance, and entertainment that disappeared in the postwar years.

✅ bellicose: describes an attitude that hopes for actual war, the word is generally applied to nations and their leaders.

✅ belligerence: can be used at every level from the personal to the global.

✅ rebellion: usually involves a group.

4. PAC: agree and peace

✅ pacify

✅ pacifist

✅ pact: generally used in the field of international relations, such as an arms pact, a trade pact or a fishing rights pact. But it may also be used for any solemn agreement or promise between two people.

✅ pace: writers use it when correcting an opinion that many people believe.

5. Crim: fault or crime; accusation

✅ criminology

✅ decriminalize

✅ incriminate: it doesn’t always refer to an actual crime. 🔺a virus has been incriminated as the cause of a type of cancer. Video games have been incriminated in the decline in study skills among young people.

✅ recrimination

6. Prob: prove or proof; honesty or integrity

✅ approbation: noun form of approve, but approbation is usually stronger than mere approval.

✅ probate

✅ probity

✅ reprobate: has been said in a tone of joshing affection, usually to describe someone of doubtful morals but good humor.

7. Grav: heavy, weighty, serious.

✅ grave

✅ gravitas

✅ gravitate

✅ aggravate

8. Lev: light; to raise or lighten

✅ alleviate

✅ elevation

✅ cantilever

✅ levity: like it’s synonym frivolity, it now has an old-fashioned ring to it and is usually used only half-seriously.

9. Mythology and history

✅ cicerone

✅ hector

✅ hedonism

✅ Nestor

✅ spartan

✅ stentorian

✅ stoic

✅ sybaritic

10. Mania: madness

✅ kleptomania

✅ dipsomaniac: (less respectful words) sot, lush, wino, souse, boozer, guzzler, tippler, tosspot, drunkard, boozehound.

✅ megalomaniac: generally use as an insult and rarely refers to a real mental illness.

✅ egomaniac

11. Psyche: breath, life, soul

✅ psyche

✅ psychedelic

✅ psychosomatic

✅ psychotherapist

12. Cept: take, seize

✅ reception: a bad 📺 reception means the signal isn’t being received well. When a new novel receives good reviews, we say it has met with a good critical reception. If it gets a poor reception, that means it wasn’t well-received.

✅ intercept

✅ perceptible: a perceptive person picks up minor changes, small clues, or hints and shades of meaning that others cannot perceive, so one person’s perception often won’t be perceptible to another.

✅ susceptible: a sickly child may be susceptible to colds, and an unlucky adult may be susceptible to back problems. A lonely elderly person may be susceptible to what a con man tells him or her on the phone. And students are usually susceptible to the teaching of an imaginative professor—that is, likely to enjoy and learn from it.

13. Fin: end or boundary

✅ confine: someone confined to a bedroom or a wheelchair is too ill or disabled to be anywhere else. A person under “house arrest” is confined to his or her house by the government. At a business meeting, the discussion may be confined to a single topic. A town may keep industrial development confined to one area by means of zoning.

✅ definitive

✅ finite: mostly used in scientific writing, often with the meaning “definitely measurable”.

✅ infinitesimal

14. Ject: throw or hurl

✅ interject

✅ conjecture

✅ projection: here used by businesses and governments. Most projections of this kind are estimates of a company’s sales or profits—or of the finances of a town, state, or country—sometime in the future.

✅ trajectory: used most often in physics and engineering. 🔺the trajectory of a whole life may be set in a person’s youth, or that a new book traces the long trajectory of the French empire.

15. Tract: drag or draw

✅ traction

✅ retract: she was forced to retract her comment about her opponent after it was condemned in the press.

✅ protracted: a protracted strike may cripple a company; a protracted rainy spell may rot the roots of vegetables; and a protracted lawsuit occasionally outlives the parties involved.

✅ intractable: describes both people and conditions. A cancer patient may suffer intractable pain that doctors are unable to treat. An intractable alcoholic goes back to the bottle immediately after “drying out”.

16. Duc/duct: to lead

✅ conducive: a cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending.

✅ deduction: a tax deduction is a subtraction from your taxable income allowed by the government for certain expenses, which will result in your paying lower taxes. Your insurance deductible is the amount of a medical bill that the insurance company makes you subtract before it starts to pay. Deduction also means “reasoning”, and particularly reasoning based on general principles to produce specific findings.

✅ induce: usually gentle persuasion(you may induce a friend to go to a concert). An inducement is something that might lure you to do something, though inducements are occasionally a bit menacing.

✅ seduction

17. Sequ: to follow

✅ sequential

✅ subsequent

✅ consequential: the “resulting” meaning of the word is usually seen in legal writing. Normally the word means “significant” or “important”, and it is especially used for events that will produce large consequences or results.

✅ non sequitur

18. Mythology

✅ Apollonian

✅ bacchanalian

✅ Delphic

✅ Dionysian

✅ jovial

✅ mercurial

✅ Olympian

✅ venereal

19. Ambi: on both sides or around

✅ ambiguous: successful politicians are good at giving ambiguous answers to questions on difficult issues. / The ambiguity of the Mona Lisa’s smile makes us wonder what she’s thinking about.

✅ ambient: ambient temperature/ ambient music/ ambience

✅ ambivalent

✅ ambit: a rather formal term often used by lawyers as in “With this new legislation, tobacco now falls within the ambit of FDA regulation.” It almost always refers to something abstract rather than an actual physical range. / a much broader social ambit.

20. Epi: on, over or attached to

✅ epilogue: in nonfiction books, we now often use the term afterword instead of epilogue, just as we now generally use forward instead of prologue.

✅ epiphyte

✅ epitaph

✅ epithet: in its other common meaning, an epithet is a mocking or insulting name.

21. Hyp/hypo: below or under

✅ hypochondriac

✅ hypoglycemia

✅ hypothermia

✅ hypothetical

22. Therm/thermo: warm

✅ thermal

✅ thermodynamics

✅ thermonuclear

✅ British thermal unit (BTU)

23. Poly: many

✅ polyp

✅ polyglot: both a noun and an adjective./ an international airport is bound to be polyglot, with people from all over the world speaking their native languages.

✅ polymer

✅ polygraph

24. Prim: first

✅ primal: generally describes something powerful and almost instinctual. / primal innocence of youth./ there was always a primal pleasure in listening to the rain beat on the roof at night and dropping off to sleep in front of the fire.

✅ primer

✅ primate

✅ primordial: applies to something that is only the starting point in a course of development or progression. A primordial landscape is one that bears no sign of human use. 25. Hom/homo: same/ similar

✅ homonym

✅ homogeneous: a neighborhood might be called homogeneous if all the people in it are similar, having pretty much the same background, education, and outlook.

✅ homologous

✅ homogenize

26. Dis: apart/ opposite or not(distaste,disagreeable)/ deprived of(disinfect)/ exclude or expel from(disbar)

✅ dissuade: the dissuading may be done by a person or by something else: a bad weather forecast may dissuade a fisherman from going out to sea that day, but a warning on a cigarette pack almost never dissuades a real smoker from having his or her next cigarette.

✅ disorient

✅ discredit

✅ dislodge: senators are attempting to dislodge the bill from the committee, where the chairman has failed to act on it for five months.

27. Latin borrowings

✅ ad hoc: for this specific purpose./ the faculty formed an ad hoc committee to deal with the question of First Amendment rights on campus.

✅ ad hominem: presidential campaigns have often relied on ad hominem attacks rather than serious discussion of important issues.

✅ alter ego

✅ de facto

✅ quid pro quo: today it often doesn’t suggest anything negative; for most people, it just means “a favor for a favor”. But in politics the phrase is often used when, for example, a wealthy corporation gives a lot of money to a candidate and experts to get a big favor in return. In such cases, some of us may prefer to describe the money as a bribe and the quid pro quo as a payoff.

✅ ex post facto

✅ modus operandi: the term is often associated with police work, and it’s a favorite of mystery writers. In speech and dialogue, it’s often abbreviated to m.o.” But it’s not only used in criminal contexts. So a frequent gambler who likes to play the horses may have a particular modus operandi for picking winners.

✅ modus vivendi

Unit 1-6: https://www.edrawsoft.cn/viewer/public/s/6bfdd324970232

Unit 7-12: https://www.edrawsoft.cn/viewer/public/s/606a3464498453

Unit 13-18: https://www.edrawsoft.cn/viewer/public/s/8204c112482162

Unit 19-24: https://www.edrawsoft.cn/viewer/public/s/8234e594938673

Unit 25-30: https://www.edrawsoft.cn/viewer/public/s/d1773549741809