GED Vocabulary… Understanding Words on the GED Test
Here’s the quote from one of the James Bond books that I started reading (Thunderball by Ian Fleming):
When he coughed—smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover—a cloud of luminous black dots swam across his vision like amoebae in pond water.
Last time I asked you how to understand “luminous” and “amoebae” and read this sentence. Pretty hard if English isn’t your first language.
So, you have to think about it. I gave you some questions that I use… first, ask: Can I understand the sentence without knowing the word? Can I get the main idea of what they’re saying?
So, I think about it. Do “luminous” and “amoebae” need to trip me up? I tried taking out the words, like this…
When he coughed—smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover—a cloud of some sort of black dots swam across his vision like something in pond water.
He coughed… hung over from smoking and drinking, huh? and some black dots swam in front of his eyes, like something in pond water. I can get the whole idea, even without knowing the words. I can kind of picture it in my head, si?
Then, I ask: Can I look at the words nearby to see about what the word means? Is there another word nearby that maybe means the same thing?
Well, with luminous, maybe it means cloudlike somehow? A cloud of luminous black dots… When I picture seeing dots like that, they’re kind of shimmering and unreal. Maybe that’s what it means?
The other one is easier… amoebae. It says, amoebae in pond water, and before that it says swimming. So, it’d be something that swims around in pond water and looks like little black dots? Like little fish or bugs maybe?
Finally, I think… can I think of another word that I would put in the sentence that makes sense? Luminous could be shimmering, like I said before, and amoebae could be little bugs.
When he coughed—smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover—a cloud of shimmering black dots swam across his vision like little bugs in pond water.
That gets me close enough to understand, right? And the more you see the words in different places, the better you can understand them. I looked it up, and luminous means like glowing, which is pretty close to shimmering. And amoebae are one-celled organisms that swim around in water. I guess that would make them like little dots, but aren’t they too small to see? I think this guy just likes using long words.