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introduction
3
The book uses carefully designed features to make learning quick and
easy:
• Truly useful, versatile words that you’ll find yourself using right
away. No lists of longest/hardest/rarest words are included. The
words here give you real word power, not silly tricks.
• Basic, simple definitions of new words. No long, complicated
historical references, just the meaning you need to use a word
correctly.
• Samples of new words in useful, believable sentences. Sample
sentences are like those you might hear or say in normal conver-
sation.
• Easy-to-understand phonetic pronunciation guides, in cases
where it may be tough to figure out how to say an unknown
word.
• A variety of exercises to keep you interested and challenged, and
help you get the new words filed permanently in your memory
bank.
• Tips and techniques for figuring out the meanings of new words
you hear or read.
• Dictionary, thesaurus, and other resources (some online) that can
help you build word power as you work with this book and
after.
• A list at the end of each lesson: Words You Should Now Know.
These are words defined and/or used in the lesson that may be
new to you. If a word has not been defined in the lesson, and you
don’t recognize it, use a dictionary to look it up.
• A list of Extra Word(s) You Learned in This Lesson. This feature pro-
vides space for you to record additional new word(s) you may
have learned in the lesson.
You’ll get the most out of this book if you do the lessons in Section 1 in
order, because each lesson builds on skills from earlier lessons. But once
you’ve finished the first section, feel free to do the rest of the lessons in a dif-
ferent order. What’s important is that you complete all the lessons, and review
any that seemed tricky the first time. If you stick with the plan, in just one
month you’ll have word power to brag about!
Your book also includes a pretest and a posttest to help you evaluate
word power before and after using the lessons. On the pretest, you’re not
expected to get all the answers right. If you did, you wouldn’t need this book!
