Vocabulary in Context Practice

Check out our Vocabulary in Context resource for more information. After completing this practice resource, make sure to make an appointment with the Writing Center to check your answers!

Underline the clues, then try writing an approximate definition

  1. According to the myth, the hero Achilles was vulnerable in just one area of his body.  He could be killed only if he was wounded in the heel.

Vulnerable means

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  1. The candidate had expected to win but instead she was trounced by her opponent, who won by a landslide.

Trounced means

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  1. Before allowing someone to deliver a personal opinion on the air, most television news programs issue a disclaimer that denies all responsibility for the views expressed.

Disclaimer means

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  1. The Chinese novelist Ha Jin is an amazingly perceptive writer, who understands human behavior in a way that few novelists can.

Perceptive means

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  1. In his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, novelist John Steinbeck movingly describes the plight of migrant farm workers in California forced to work under brutal and dehumanizing conditions.

Plight means

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  1. Inventors don’t necessarily care if their inventions are lucrative; often they just have an idea they are desperate to make reality, and money doesn’t matter.

Lucrative means

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  1. Looking filthy and disreputable after being lost for a month in the woods, the children were finally discovered by a team of hunting dogs.

Disreputable means

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  1. The parents realized that Jonah was a child prodigy when his teacher told them that the eight-year-old was reading books written for high school students.

Prodigy means

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  1. The soldier was a member of an elite group of special forces who had been highly trained just for such international emergencies.

Elite means

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Kaylan|2019

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