TỪ VỰNG TOEIC unit 26

Unit 26
MUR POLIS/POLIT NUMER KILO MICRO MULTI PAR PHOB
HEM/HEMO ITIS Medical Words
Quiz 26-1 Quiz 26-2 Quiz 26-3 Quiz 26-4 Quiz 26-5 Review Quizzes 26
MUR, from the Latin noun murus, meaning “wall,” has produced a modest
number of English words.


muralist

A painter of wall paintings.

• She's enjoying her new career as a muralist, but it's terribly hard on her
when she sees her works wrecked by vandals.
Any wall painting may be called a mural. Murals have been around since
long before the framed painting. Scenic murals date back to at least 2000
B.C. on the island of Crete. Indoor murals for private homes were popular in
ancient Greece and Rome, and many of those at Pompeii were preserved by
the lava of Mt. Vesuvius. In the Renaissance the muralists Raphael and
Michelangelo created great wall and ceiling paintings for the Catholic
Church, and Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper became one of the most
famous of all murals. Mural painting saw a great revival in Mexico beginning
in the 1920s, when a group of muralists inspired by the Mexican Revolution,
including Diego Rivera, J. C. Orozco, and D. A. Siqueiros, began taking their
intensely political art to the public by creating giant wall paintings,
sometimes on outdoor surfaces.


intramural
Existing or occurring within the bounds of an
institution, especially a school.

• At college he lacked the time to go out for sports in a serious way, but he
did play intramural hockey all four years.
With its Latin prefix intra-, “within” (not to be confused with inter-,
“between”), intramural means literally “within the walls.” The word is
usually used for sports played between teams made up only from students at
one campus. Intramural athletics is often the most popular extracurricular
activity at a college or university.


extramural
Existing outside or beyond the walls or
boundaries of an organized unit such as a school or hospital.
• “Hospital Without Walls” is an extramural program that offers home healthcare services.
Extramural contains the Latin extra-, meaning “outside” or “beyond” (see
EXTRA). The walls in extramural are usually those of schools, colleges, and
universities, and the word is often seen in phrases like “extramural activities”
and “extramural competition,” referring to things that involve the world
beyond the campus. Some institutions use the term “extramural study” for
what others call “distance learning”—that is, teaching and learning by means
of Web connections to the classroom and to videos of lectures. Money that
flows into universities to support research (from foundations, government
institutes, etc.) is usually called “extramural income.”


immure

To enclose within, or as if within, walls; imprison.

• In Dumas's famous novel, the Count of Monte Cristo is in fact a sailor who
had been unjustly immured in an island prison for 15 years before breaking

out and taking his revenge.
In Eastern European legend, whenever a large bridge or fort was completed, a
young maiden would be immured in the stonework as a sacrifice. (It's not
certain that such things were actually done.) In Poe's grim story “A Cask of
Amontillado,” a man achieves revenge on a fellow nobleman by chaining
him to a cellar wall and bricking him up alive. At the end of Verdi's great
opera Aida, Aida joins her lover so that they can die immured together. But
real-life examples of immurement as a final punishment are somewhat harder
to find.


POLIS/POLIT comes from the Greek word for “city.” The ancient Greek
city-states, such as Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, operated much like separate
nations, so all their politics was local, like all their public policy—and even
all their police!


politic
of action.

(1) Cleverly tactful. (2) Wise in promoting a plan or plan

• Anger is rarely a politic way to seek agreement, since it usually comes
across as rude and self-righteous.
Politic behavior in class always requires a respectful attitude toward your
teacher. It's never politic to ask for a raise when your boss is in a terrible
mood. And once teenagers learn to drive, they quickly learn the politic way to
ask for the car—that is, whatever gets the keys without upsetting the parents.
As you can see, politic can be used for many situations that have nothing to
do with public politics.

politicize

To give a political tone or character to.

• By 1968 the Vietnam War had deeply politicized most of America's college
campuses.
Sexual harassment was once seen as a private matter, but in the 1980s and
'90s it became thoroughly politicized, with women loudly pressuring
lawmakers to make it illegal. So, at the same time, the issue of sexual
harassment politicized many women, who began to take an interest in
political action because of it. In other words, we may speak of an issue
becoming politicized, but also of a person or group becoming politicized.


acropolis
ancient Greek city.

The high, fortified part of a city, especially an

• On the Athenian Acropolis, high above the rest of the city, stands the
Parthenon, a temple to Athena.
The Greek root acro- means “high”; thus, an acropolis is basically a “high
city.” Ancient cities often grew up around a high point, in order that they
could easily be defended. The Greeks and Romans usually included in their
acropolises temples to the city's most important gods; so, for example, Athens
built a great temple on its Acropolis to its protector goddess, Athena, from
which the city took its name. Many later European cities cluster around a
walled castle on a height, into which the population of the city and the

surrounding area could retreat in case of attack, and even South American
cities often contain a similar walled area on high ground.


megalopolis
(1) A very large city. (2) A thickly
populated area that includes one or more cities with the surrounding suburbs.
• With its rapid development, the southern coast of Florida around Miami
quickly became a megalopolis.
A “large city” named Megalopolis was founded in Greece in 371 B.C. to help
defend the region called Arcadia against the city-state of Sparta. Though a
stadium seating 20,000 was built there, indicating the city's impressive size
for its time, Megalopolis today has only about 5,000 people. Social scientists
now identify 10 megalopolises in the U.S., each with more than 10 million
people. The one on the eastern seaboard that stretches from Boston to
Washington, D.C., where the densely populated cities seem to flow into each
other all along the coast, is now home to over 50 million people. But it's
easily surpassed by the Japanese megalopolis that includes Tokyo, with more
than 80 million inhabitants.


Quiz 26-1
A. Fill in each blank with the correct letter:
a. muralist
b. politic
c. megalopolis
d. immure
e. extramural
f. acropolis
g. politicize

h. intramural
1. Chicago itself has fewer than 3 million inhabitants, but the ___ that
includes Milwaukee and Madison has over 14 million.
2. Her fear of theft was so great that she actually intended to ___ all the gold
and silver behind a brick wall in the basement, leaving clues to the location in
her will.
3. He knew it was never ___ to mention his own children's achievements
around his brother, whose oldest son was in prison.
4. They had hired a professional ___ to paint the walls of the staircase with a
flowery landscape.
5. The city government buildings occupied an ___, high above the factories
that lined the riverbank.
6. Women's softball was the most popular of the college's ___ sports.
7. Most voters thought it was unfortunate that the candidates had actually
managed to ___ a traffic accident.
8. The government mental-health center in Washington, D.C., conducts its
own research but also funds ___ research at universities across the country.
Answers


B. Match the word on the left with the correct definition on the right.
1. megalopolis a. within an institution
2. immure
b. seal up
3. intramural c. high part of a city
4. politic
d. turn into a political issue
5. acropolis e. wall painter
6. politicize f. huge urban area
7. muralist

g. shrewdly sensitive
8. extramural h. outside an institution
Answers


NUMER comes from the Latin words meaning “number” and “to count.” A
numeral is the symbol that represents a number. Numerous means “many,”
and innumerable means “countless.” Numerical superiority is superiority in
numbers, and your numerical standing in a class is a ranking expressed as a
number.


numerology
numbers.

The study of the occult significance of

• Though he didn't believe in numerology as a mystical bond between
numbers and living things, he never went out on Friday the 13th.
As an element of astrology and fortune-telling, numerology has long been
employed to predict future events. For many early Christians, 3 represented
the Trinity, 6 represented earthly perfection, and 7 represented heavenly
perfection; and still today, many of us like to group things into sets of 3 or 7,
for no particular reason. Numerology has also been used to interpret
personality; in particular, numerologists may assign numbers to each letter of
a person's name and use the resulting figures, along with the person's date of
birth, as a guide to his or her character.


alphanumeric

Having or using both letters and numbers.

• Back in the 1950s, we always spoke our phone numbers in alphanumeric
form, using the letters printed on the dial: for example, “TErrace 5-6642,”
instead of “835-6642.”
Alphanumeric passwords are much harder for a hacker to crack than plain
alphabetic passwords, since the number of possible combinations is so much
greater. License plates usually contain both letters and numbers, since, for a
big state or country, the plate wouldn't be large enough to fit enough numbers
for everyone. In computing, the standard alphanumeric codes, such as ASCII,
may contain not only ordinary letters and numerals but also punctuation
marks and math symbols.


enumerate

To specify one after another; list.

• The thing he hated most was when she would start enumerating his faults
out loud, while he would sit scowling into the newspaper trying to ignore her.
In a census year, the U.S. government attempts to enumerate every single
citizen of the country—a task that, even in the modern era of technology, isn't
truly possible. Medical tests often require the enumeration of bacteria,
viruses, or other organisms to determine the progress of a disease or the
effectiveness of a medication. Despite its numer- root, you don't have to use
numbers when enumerating. For students of government and law, the
“enumerated powers” are the specific responsibilities of the Congress, as
listed in the U.S. Constitution; these are the only powers that Congress has, a
fact that the Tenth Amendment makes even more clearly.

supernumerary

Exceeding the usual number.

• Whenever the workload for the city's courts and judges gets too large,
supernumerary judges are called in to help.
Supernumerary starts off with the Latin prefix super-, “above” (see SUPER).
You may have heard of someone being born with supernumerary teeth,
supernumerary fingers, or supernumerary toes. A supernumerary rainbow
may show up as a faint line—red, green, or purple—just touching the main
colored arc. Supernumerary is also a noun: A supernumerary is usually
someone in a crowd scene onstage, otherwise known as an “extra” or a
“spear-carrier.”


KILO is the French version of the Greek word chilioi, meaning “thousand.”
France is also where the metric system originated, in the years following the
French Revolution. So in English, kilo- shows up chiefly in metric-system
units. Before the computer age, the most familiar kilo- words for Englishspeakers were probably kilowatt, meaning “1,000 watts,” and kilowatt-hour,
meaning the amount of energy equal to one kilowatt over the course of an
hour.


kilobyte

A unit of computer information equal to 1,024 bytes.

• A 200-word paragraph in the simplest text format takes up about a kilobyte

of storage space on your hard drive.
Knowing the root kilo-, you might think a kilobyte would be exactly 1,000
bytes. But actually a kilobyte represents the power of 2 that comes closest to
1,000: that is, 210 (2 to the 10th power), or 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 ×
2, or 1,024. Why 2? Because the capacity of memory chips is always based
on powers of 2. Locations in electronic memory circuits are identified by
binary numbers (numbers that use only the digits 0 and 1), so the number of
addressable locations becomes a power of 2.


kilometer

A unit of length equal to 1,000 meters.

• U.S. highway signs near the Canadian border often show distances in
kilometers in addition to miles.
A kilometer is equal to about 62/100 of a mile, and a mile is equal to about
1.61 kilometers. The U.S. has been slow to adopt metric measures, which are
used almost everywhere else in the world. Though our car speedometers are
often marked in both miles and kilometers, the U.S. and Great Britain are
practically the only developed nations that still show miles rather than
kilometers on their road signs. But even in the U.S., footraces are usually
measured in meters or kilometers, like the Olympic races. Runners normally
abbreviate kilometer to K: “a 5K race” (3.1 miles), “the 10K run” (6.2 miles),
and so on.


kilohertz
second.

A unit of frequency equal to 1,000 cycles per

• A drone aircraft nosedived and crashed after an onboard tape recorder
turned out to be using a 10-kilohertz signal, the same frequency used by the
aircraft's control system.
If your favorite AM radio station has a frequency of 680 kilohertz (kHz), that
means the station's transmitter is oscillating (vibrating) at a rate of 680,000
cycles per second (i.e., 680,000 times a second). A related term is megahertz
(MHz), meaning “millions of cycles per second.” Shortwave radio operates
between 5.9 and 26.1 MHz, and the FM radio band operates between 88 and
108 MHz. Garage-door openers work at about 40 MHz, baby monitors work
at 49 MHz, and so on. The terms hertz, kilohertz and megahertz honor the
great German physicist Heinrich Hertz, the first person to broadcast and
receive radio waves.


kilogram

A unit of weight equal to 1,000 grams.

• The kilogram is the only base unit of measurement still defined by a
physical object rather than a physical constant (such as the speed of light).
The original concept of the kilogram, as the mass of a cubic decimeter of
water (a bit more than a quart), was adopted as the base unit of mass by the
new revolutionary government of France in 1793. In 1875, in the Treaty of
the Meter, 17 countries, including the U.S., adopted the French kilogram as
an international standard. In 1889 a new international standard for the
kilogram, a metal bar made of platinum iridium, was agreed to; President
Benjamin Harrison officially received the 1-kilogram cylinder for the U.S. in
1890. But no one uses that bar very often; for all practical purposes, a

kilogram equals 2.2 pounds.


Quiz 26-2
A. Match each word on the left to its correct definition on the right:
1. kilobyte
a. 3/5 of a mile
2. enumerate
b. extra
3. supernumerary c. measure of electronic capacity
4. kilogram
d. list
5. kilohertz
e. occult use of numbers
6. numerology f. 1,000 vibrations per second
7. alphanumeric g. 2.2 pounds
8. kilometer
h. combining numbers and letters
Answers


B. Fill in each blank with the correct letter:
a. supernumerary
b. kilogram
c. enumerate
d. kilohertz
e. kilobyte
f. kilometer
g. alphanumeric
h. numerology

1. Every Tuesday there's a 5-___ race along the river, which is short enough
that 10-year-olds sometimes run it.
2. For his annual salary review, his boss always asks him to ___ the projects
he completed during the previous year.
3. On a hard drive, a ___ is enough capacity for a few sentences of text, but
for audio or video it's too small to even mention.
4. As a child, she had a couple of ___ teeth, which the dentist pulled when
she was 8 years old.
5. The broadcast frequencies of FM stations are required to be 200 ___ apart
so as not to interfere with each other.
6. When they first moved to Berlin, it took them a few days to get used to
buying potatoes and oranges by the ___ rather than the pound.
7. She occasionally visited a local fortune-teller, who would use playing
cards and ___ to predict her future.
8. The Web site uses six-character ___ passwords, of which there are enough
for tens of millions of users.
Answers


MICRO, from the Greek mikros, meaning “small,” is a popular English
prefix. A microscope lets the eye see microscopic objects, and libraries store
the pages of old newspapers on microfilm at 1/400th of their original size.
And we continue to attach micro- to lots of familiar words; most of us could
figure out the meaning of microbus and microquake without ever having
heard them before. Scientists often use micro- to mean “millionth”; thus, a
microsecond is a millionth of a second, and a micrometer is a millionth of a
meter.