TỪ VỰNG TOEIC unit 29

Unit 29
NECRO PALEO CIRCU/CIRCUM MINI/MINU INTER SUR CO SYN
Words from Mythology and History
Quiz 29-1 Quiz 29-2 Quiz 29-3 Quiz 29-4 Quiz 29-5 Review Quizzes 29
NECRO comes from the Greek nekros, meaning “dead body,” so it's not
surprising that it shows up in some unappetizing places. A necrophagous
insect, for instance, is one that feeds on dead bodies; when homicide
investigators discover a corpse, they may use the insect evidence to figure out
when the person died.


necrosis

Death of living tissue, usually within a limited area.

• He had ignored the spider bite for several days, and his doctor was alarmed
to see that serious necrosis had set in.
Cells die naturally after a period of time, but may also die as a result of
injuries, infections, or cancer. Burns produce necrosis, and the bedsores
suffered by nursing-home patients are a form of necrosis. The dreaded
condition known as gangrene, in which the dying tissue turns black or green,
is another form. When untreated, the dying cells release substances that lead
to the death of surrounding cells, so untreated necrosis can lead to death.
Treatment usually requires the removal of the necrotic tissue, and in severe
cases can even involve amputating a limb.


necromancer
One who conjures the spirits of the dead
in order to magically reveal the future or influence the course of events.
• Her specialty is communication with the dead, and she might once have

been known as a necromancer, but her sign says simply “Psychic.”
The practice of necromancy goes back as far as the ancient Assyrians and
Babylonians and has continued through all the centuries since. In the Middle
Ages it became associated with black magic; condemned by the church, it
had to be practiced secretly. In Europe a necromancer might work in a remote
graveyard at night, standing within a magical circle he had drawn to shield
himself from the anger of the spirits. The grave of a person who had died
suddenly or violently might be plundered for its body parts; the unused
energy these were believed to contain made them valuable in the necromantic
ceremony. But body parts aren't essential to necromancy, which is now
practiced by channelers, mediums, and shamans, and even by groups of
amateurs sitting around a Ouija board.


necropolis
cemetery of an ancient city.

A cemetery, especially a large, elaborate

• On Sundays the downtown is like a necropolis, and he was always slightly
disturbed by the complete absence of life among all those buildings.
With its -polis ending, meaning “city” (see POLIS/POLIT), a necropolis is a
“city of the dead.” Most of the famous necropolises of Egypt line the Nile
River across from their cities. In ancient Greece and Rome, a necropolis
would often line the road leading out of a city; in the 1940s a great Roman
necropolis was discovered under the Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica. Some
more recent cemeteries especially deserve the name necropolis because they
resemble cities of aboveground tombs, a necessity in low-lying areas such as
New Orleans where a high water table prevents underground burial.

necropsy
animal.

An autopsy, especially one performed on an

• Daisy's sudden death was so mysterious that we paid for a necropsy, and it
turned out she'd been a victim of lethal chemicals in our imported dog food.
Human autopsies are generally performed either to determine the cause of
death or to observe the deadly effects of a disease for research or education
purposes. Autopsies may be necessary when tracking an epidemic; they're
also performed to discover whether a death might actually have resulted from
murder, and if so, what evidence it might reveal that could help catch the
murderer. Animal necropsies are actually more common than human
autopsies, since a farmer with livestock is always concerned that whatever
killed one animal not pose a threat to the others.


PALEO comes from the Greek palaios, meaning “ancient”—that is, “older
than old.” The prefix sometimes gets attached to very recognizable words;
paleobiology, for instance, deals with the biology of fossil organisms,
paleogeography is the study of geography in earlier geological eras, and
paleoecology is the study of the relationship of plants and animals to their
environment in those eras.


Paleolithic
Of or relating to the earliest period of the Stone
Age, characterized by rough or chipped stone implements.
• He raves about the health benefits of his Paleolithic diet, the kind that our

pre-agricultural, hunting-and-gathering Stone Age ancestors would have
eaten.
Since lithos means “stone” in Greek, the name Paleolithic was given to the
older part of the Stone Age. The first known period of human culture, the
Paleolithic actually covers almost all of human history, from the first use of
stone tools around 2.5 million years ago until the invention of agriculture
around 10,000 years ago. For almost all that time, humans used the very
crudest of stone tools, produced by chipping away flakes of stone in order to
make an edge for an ax or knife. Near the end of the period, animal bones and
antlers were being used for tools, especially pointed tools, and sculpted
figures and cave art were being produced. The Paleolithic gave way to the
Mesolithic (“Middle Stone Age”) period, with its tools made of polished
stone, wood, and bone.


paleography
(1) The study of ancient writings and
inscriptions. (2) Ancient writings.
• For her thesis on Central American paleography, she spent a winter in
Honduras studying rock inscriptions 30 miles upriver from the nearest town.
The world's oldest literature dates from about 4,000 years ago, from the land
known as Sumer (now southern Iraq). Early writing took the form of
pictographs, very simple pictures that first represented things or ideas and
later came to represent actual words. The first actual alphabet, in which each
character represents a sound, appeared in the same general region about 500
years later. But writing developed in very different ways in different parts of
the world, and 1,000 years later, when Europeans first arrived in the New
World, alphabetic writing still wasn't being used anywhere in the Americas.
Decoding some ancient languages has proven to be a huge task for
paleographers, and determining the age and the source of a piece of writing

can pose major challenges.


paleontology
A science dealing with the life of past
geological periods as known from fossil remains.
• Her obsession with dinosaurs as a child continued through her teens, and no
one was surprised when she started graduate school in paleontology.
Until the 1820s, hardly anyone even suspected that dinosaurs had ever
existed. In the years since, paleontology has sought to discover the entire
history of life on earth, from the era of single-celled organisms up into the
human era. Paleontologists continue to make remarkable discoveries, such as
that a huge meteorite that fell in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out the dinosaurs
—all except the birds, the only surviving dinosaurs. “Radiometric dating” can
reveal the age (often tens of millions of years) of a rock or fossil or a tiny
grain of pollen by measuring how much its radioactive elements have
disintegrated. The study of molecules of DNA, RNA, and proteins has also
become important for dating. Paleontologists often consult with geologists
searching for oil, gas, and coal deposits, since all these “fossil fuels” were
formed from plant and animal remains.


Paleozoic
The era of geological history, ending about 248
million years ago, in which vertebrates and land plants first appeared.
• His geological specialty was the beginning of the Paleozoic, from which the
earliest fish fossils date.
The Greek root zo- means “animal,” so names such as Paleozoic were
invented to refer to a period in the development of animal life. For geologists,
the Paleozoic era is followed by the Mesozoic (meso- meaning “middle”),

which is followed by the Cenozoic (cen- meaning “recent”). Eras are huge
stretches of time; geologists break eras down into smaller “periods” and
“epochs.” Thus, the Paleozoic ends with the Permian period, the Mesozoic
ends with the Upper Cretaceous epoch, and the Cenozoic ends with the
Holocene epoch—the epoch in which we are living. The Paleozoic era
produced the first fish, the first land plants, the first insects, and the first
amphibians and reptiles; the dinosaurs, birds, and mammals had to wait for
the Mesozoic.


Quiz 29-1
A. Fill in each blank with the correct letter:
a. Paleolithic
b. necrosis
c. Paleozoic
d. necropsy
e. paleography
f. necromancer
g. paleontology
h. necropolis
1. The frostbite was bad and there was a chance of ___ setting in, so we had
to work fast.
2. With his specialty in ___, he spent much of his time on the rivers of Peru
looking for rocks with ancient carvings.
3. Grief-stricken parents would go to the village ___, who would try to
contact their dead children.
4. They were certain the cat hadn't died of natural causes, and the ___
revealed that they were right.
5. The men's graves in this Iron Age ___ held numerous weapons.
6. The wall paintings date from the end of the ___, just before the beginning

of settled farming villages.
7. Millions of kids are fascinated by dinosaurs, but not many will go on to
study ___ in college.
8. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, and primitive fish inhabited the earth during
the ___ era, but not mammals.
Answers


B. Indicate whether the following pairs of terms have the same or
different meanings:
1. Paleozoic / of the period about 10,000 years ago
same ___ / different ___
2. necropsy / autopsy
same ___ / different ___
3. necromancer / gravedigger
same ___ / different ___
4. paleography / study of ancient writings
same ___ / different ___
5. Paleolithic / Old Stone Age
same ___ / different ___
6. necrosis / tissue death
same ___ / different ___
7. necropolis / cemetery
same ___ / different ___
8. paleontology / study of past geological periods
same ___ / different ___
Answers


CIRCU/CIRCUM comes from the Latin circus, meaning “circle.” So a

circus is traditionally held under a round tent. A circuit can be a tour around
an area or territory, or the complete path of an electric current. To
circumnavigate means “to navigate around”—often around the world.


circuitous
(1) Having a circular or winding course. (2) Not
forthright or direct in action.
• She sometimes arrives at her conclusions by circuitous reasoning that her
students can't even follow.
Circuitous is usually the opposite of direct, and it's generally used to describe
either roads or explanations. Detours are usually circuitous, and a circuitous
path, twisting and turning and cutting back on itself, is the kind of route you'd
expect to find in the mountains. Lawyers often find themselves making
circuitous arguments, which may get most circuitous when they're defending
particularly undesirable clients.


circumference
(1) The perimeter or boundary of a circle.
(2) The outer boundary or surface of a shape or object.
• To calculate the circumference of a circle, multiply its diameter by 3.1416.
Attempts have been made to measure the circumference of the earth since the
time of Aristotle. The calculation that Columbus was relying on led him to
think he could reach China by sailing west more quickly than by sailing east.
But that measurement had calculated the earth's circumference as about a
quarter too small, and the rest is history. Columbus wasn't the only one who
got it wrong; many later attempts continued to produce different
measurements for the earth's circumference—even though the Greeks had
calculated it correctly way back in the 3rd century B.C.

circumspect
Careful to consider all circumstances and
possible consequences; cautious.
• Her answer was careful and circumspect, and I couldn't help thinking she
knew a lot more than she was telling.
Since spect- comes from the Latin word for “look,” circumspect basically
means “looking around” yourself before you act. Being a doctor has
traditionally called for a circumspect personality, which gives their patients
confidence in them. Scholars are known for their circumspection, since
there's nothing worse for scholars' reputations than mistakes in the books or
articles they've written. Bankers once had a reputation for great
circumspection, but the financial disaster of 2008 earned some bankers a very
different kind of reputation.


circumvent
(1) To make a circuit around. (2) To manage
to get around, especially by clever means.
• We knew there was a traffic jam on the highway and circumvented it by
using back roads.
In mythology, a person's attempts to circumvent fate are almost always
doomed. In the Iliad we're told of how Achilles' mother, Thetis, hoping to
circumvent the prophecy that her child would die in a war against Troy,
disguised the boy as a woman. But clever Odysseus, recruiting for the Greek
army, arrived disguised as a peddler, and among the jewels he displayed to
the women of the household he laid a sword. The young Achilles, ignoring
the jewelry, immediately seized the sword, thereby identifying himself for
what he was. Today we more often hear of attempts to circumvent the law, or

at least some requirements that we'd rather not have to deal with.


MINI/MINU come from Latin words meaning “small” and “least.” So the
minimum is the least, and a minute amount is almost nothing. And mini- is all
too familiar as a prefix that we've been applying to all kinds of things since
the 1950s: minivan, miniskirt, mini-mart, minipark, and the rest.


minimalism
A style or technique (as in music,
literature, or design) that is characterized by extreme spareness and
simplicity.
• He'd never understood what anyone liked about minimalism, since
minimalist stories always seemed to leave out any description of people's
characters and motivation and rarely even described their surroundings.
In the 1960s, a few composers, including Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John
Adams, began writing music inspired by the music of India and Southeast
Asia, often with a quick pulsing beat and chords that are repeated quickly
over and over while small changes are slowly introduced. Minimalist art,
which began appearing around the same time, tries to strip away all personal
elements, often leaving only pure geometric forms; you may have seen the
plain silver boxes of Donald Judd, or the straight neon tubes of Bruce
Nauman. In literature, the stripped-down fiction of Samuel Beckett and
Raymond Carver is often considered minimalist. But there's a real question
whether these various types of minimalism should even be considered the
same concept.


minuscule

Very small.

• For someone who had been living on a minuscule budget since graduating
from college, even the paycheck for a minimum-wage job felt like wealth to
her.
As a noun, minuscule means a style of ancient or medieval handwriting script
with smaller letters than earlier scripts. There were actually several
minuscules, but the most important was promoted from around A.D. 800 on
by Charlemagne, who believed that any educated person in the Holy Roman
Empire should be able to read the Latin written by anyone else. If you've ever
looked at a medieval manuscript, you've probably seen minuscule script,
along with so-called majuscule (for modern type, we would use the words
lowercase and capital instead); even today most of us can read medieval
minuscule and majuscule without too much trouble. Be careful about spelling
minuscule; we tend to expect a word meaning “small” to begin with minirather than minu-.


minutiae

Very small or minor details.

• She likes “thinking big,” and gets annoyed when her job requires her to deal
with what she considers minutiae.
As you might guess, this word comes straight from Latin. The Romans used
it in its singular form, minutia, to mean “smallness,” and in the plural to mean
“trifles”; today we almost always use it in the plural with that same “trifles”
meaning. Hardly anyone ever talks about minutiae except to dismiss their
importance. So you may talk about the minutiae of daily life or the minutiae
of a contract, or about getting bogged down or buried in minutiae at the

office. Just don't forget that the devil is often in the details.


diminutive

(1) Indicating small size. (2) Very small.

• In German, Hänsel is a diminutive form of Hans (which is a diminutive
form of Johannes), and Gretel is a diminutive form of Margaret.
Just as diminish means “to grow smaller,” diminutive means “very small.”
When writing about language, diminutive as both an adjective and a noun
refers to particular endings and the words made with them to indicate
smallness. In English, such endings include -et and -ette (piglet, dinette,
cigarette, diskette) as well as -ie and -y (doggy, bootie, Bobby, Debbie).
However, diminutives are more common in many other languages. Outside of
language, diminutive is used for many things, including people (“She noticed
a diminutive figure standing shyly by the door”), but often not very seriously
(“We were served some rather diminutive rolls”).


Quiz 29-2
A. Fill in each blank with the correct letter:
a. circumference
b. minimalism
c. circumvent
d. minuscule
e. diminutive
f. circumspect
g. circuitous
h. minutiae

1. He enjoys working on actual cases, but he gets worn down by the flood of
___ involved in billing his clients.
2. She's a big fan of ___ in Web design, and Google's white home page has
always been her ideal.
3. The banking industry generally works hard to ___ any laws that tend to
restrict their ability to make profits.
4. Whenever we asked where his income came from, he would say something
vague and ___ and treat it as a joke.
5. We finally found the house, but only after getting completely lost and
taking an extremely ___ route.
6. She can't stand it when they start arguing over ___ differences while
ignoring the really important issues.
7. People often comment on the contrast between his ___ physique and the
enormous power he wields on Capitol Hill.
8. The race course runs the entire ___ of the lake twice, a total of ten miles.
Answers


B. Match the definition on the left to the correct word on the right:
1. cautious
a. circumference
2. roundabout
b. circumvent
3. rim
c. minuscule
4. details
d. minutiae
5. miniature
e. circumspect
6. style of extreme simplicity f. diminutive

7. small
g. circuitous
8. get around
h. minimalism
Answers


INTER comes straight from Latin. In English it has various meanings; all of
them can be expressed broadly as “between,” but they're still quite distinct:
“moving between” (intercity), “communicating between” (intercom),
“coming between” (intercept), and so on. No wonder so many English words
begin with inter-.