vocabulary
milhayser | March 14, 2014Testing behemoth ETS announced a re-revised SAT for 2015, trying to stay one step ahead of its rival and the legions of teenagers who game standardized tests. Suggesting the vocabulary section was intended as "a proxy test for wide reading," Chad Orzel says memorizing obscure words is "dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the 'right' way." Indeed, in the contemporary college prep atmosphere of clubs, sports, musical instruments, and hours of homework, who has time to read anyway? Even English students are likely to stick to SparkNotes (whose…
milhayser | March 2, 2014Solar cells made with bismuth vanadate achieve a surface area of 32 square meters per gram. This compound can be paired with cheap oxides to split water molecules (and make hydrogen) with record efficiency.
Short-term geoengineering could postpone global warming, only to have it happen more quickly in the future.
Carotenoids tinge blackbird bills a deep orange, signalling fitness; birds with oranger bills are "are heavier and larger, have less blood parasites and pair with females in better condition than males with yellow bills."
Fibroblasts can extrude a tidy biological scaffold for stem-…
gregladen | June 1, 2010I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses.
1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.
This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2007tags: vocabulary, online quiz
Your Vocabulary Score: A+
Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!
You must be quite an erudite person.
How's Your Vocabulary?
How about you? By the way, I actually have linked to an even better vocabulary game that will appear Sunday. The upcoming game will ask you to define vocabulary words and, if you get the word correct, you not only get a harder word to define, but the game will also donate ten grains of rice to the United Nations to help end world hunger. Weird, I know, but it's a fun game!