High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Word Change Patterns

"Her wonder at the museum was childlike; her sulking at the exit was childish." What does the change from -like to -ish signal?

"She was not merely sensible of the danger; she was sensitive to it, flinching at every creak." What does the shift from sensible to sensitive imply?

"The mayor called the plan not unworkable but merely unworked: no one had yet tried it." What is the effect of shifting from unworkable to unworked?

"Calling the speech historic is wrong; it was merely historical, a review of events long past." The writer's objection depends on which distinction?

The curator's essay opened with a provocation: "To call a painting derivative is, in most gallery circles, to dismiss it. Yet the Latin root suggests only that something has been drawn from a source, as a stream is drawn from a river. The pejorative flavor is a modern accretion. When Renaissance masters were called derivative of the ancients, the term functioned as praise; the derivation was proof of learned lineage. Only in an age obsessed with originality could 'to draw from' become an insult."

The curator's discussion of derivative is primarily intended to demonstrate that:

From a novel narrated by an aging philologist:

"My grandson brought home a school essay in which he described a treaty as 'inflammable,' meaning, he insisted, that it could not be set alight—that its provisions were fireproof. I explained, gently, that inflammable means precisely the opposite: capable of bursting into flame. The prefix in-, so often a negator (invisible, inedible), here derives from a different Latin source altogether—in- meaning 'into' or 'upon,' as in inflame, inscribe, induce. English inherited both prefixes, spelled identically, and so inflammable became one of the language's cruelest little traps. Safety officials now prefer flammable, having surrendered to the confusion."

The narrator's explanation of inflammable illustrates which principle of English word-formation?

From an editorial:

"The mayor called the proposal impracticable and considered the matter settled. But impracticable and impractical are not interchangeable, and the difference matters. An impractical plan is inconvenient, inefficient, or unwise—one could execute it, but one shouldn't. An impracticable plan cannot be executed at all; it is barred by circumstance or physical law. To call the housing initiative impracticable is to make a far stronger claim than to call it impractical, and it is a claim the mayor did not, in his remarks, support with evidence. The suffix -able here does heavy lifting: it converts a critique of wisdom into a declaration of impossibility."

The editorial's argument depends on the distinction that the suffix -able (in impracticable):

In her keynote address to the medical ethics symposium, Dr. Vance argued that the profession had grown complacent. "We speak of beneficence," she said, "as though the mere utterance of the word were itself an act of virtue. But the physician who benefits her patient in body while maleficently disregarding the patient's dignity has not fulfilled her oath—she has merely performed half of it. The prefix matters. To do good and to refuse to do harm are two commitments, not one, and the collapse of the second into the first is the quiet catastrophe of modern practice."

Based on the contrast Dr. Vance draws, the word maleficently most nearly means:

Excerpt from a linguistics lecture:

"Consider the trio credible, credulous, and creditable. All three descend from the Latin credere, 'to believe,' yet English has assigned them sharply divergent duties. A credible witness is one whom we may believe. A credulous witness is one who himself believes too easily—the suffix -ulous often marking an excess or tendency. A creditable performance is one deserving of belief in the older sense of credit, that is, deserving of praise or recognition. To confuse these is not merely a stylistic lapse; it is to misread the machinery of English word-formation, which loads suffixes with implications the root alone cannot bear."

According to the lecturer, the suffix -ulous in credulous functions to:

From an essay on scientific vocabulary:

"The suffix -phobia has migrated from clinical Greek into the vocabulary of social criticism, and the migration has cost us precision. Originally, -phobia named a pathological, irrational fear—claustrophobia, arachnophobia—rooted in the phobic's own psyche. When we speak now of xenophobia or homophobia, we do not usually mean that the bigot suffers from a diagnosable panic; we mean that he harbors hostility and prejudice. The word retains the clinical suffix but has annexed a moral vocabulary the Greeks would not have recognized. Whether this drift illuminates or obscures the phenomena it names is a question worth asking."

The essayist's central observation about the suffix -phobia is that:

From a study guide on legal vocabulary:

"The suffixes -or and -ee form a matched pair in legal English, denoting the giver and receiver of an action. A lessor grants a lease; a lessee holds it. A grantor conveys; a grantee accepts. A mortgagor pledges property; a mortgagee receives the pledge. Students frequently invert these, and the inversion in a contract can transfer millions of dollars in the wrong direction. Note, however, that not every -ee word obeys this rule: an escapee is not one who is escaped-from, and a retiree is not the recipient of anyone's retiring. The pattern is powerful but not universal."

According to the passage, which statement best captures the relationship between the suffixes -or and -ee?

From a memoir by a rare-book librarian:

"Cataloguing an eighteenth-century manuscript, I encountered the word awful used to describe a cathedral, and I had to remind myself that the author was praising it. Awful once meant full of awe—reverent, worthy of wonder. Only later did it curdle into its modern sense of terrible. The path is common enough: terrific once meant terrifying; artificial once meant made with skill (full of art); silly once meant blessed. Words drift, and the suffix -ful is a particularly unreliable friend, sometimes preserving its original 'full of' sense (joyful, graceful) and sometimes emptying it out entirely (awful, and increasingly, in casual speech, dreadful)."

The librarian's observations about awful and similar words most directly support which generalization?

From a memoir on translation:

"When I first encountered the Portuguese saudade, my instructors offered nostalgia as its equivalent. But nostalgia—from Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain)—is precise: it is the ache for return. Saudade is broader, softer, longing for what may never have existed. I came to see that English, too, layers such pains: nostalgia aches for a place, melancholy pools without object, and rue stings with self-reproach. Each word encodes not merely a feeling but the shape of a feeling, the direction its wound faces."

The memoirist's analysis of nostalgia is best characterized as an example of:

From a philosophy textbook:

"Students often stumble over the pair disinterested and uninterested, treating them as synonyms. The confusion is understandable but consequential. Uninterested signals absence of interest—boredom, indifference. Disinterested, by contrast, signals absence of self-interest—impartiality. A judge should be disinterested; she must not be uninterested. The prefixes un- and dis- here perform quite different labor: un- negates the presence of a quality, while dis- often reverses or separates one from a specific involvement. To mistake the one for the other is to confuse the impartial arbiter with the indifferent bureaucrat."

The textbook's explanation implies that dis- in disinterested functions most similarly to dis- in which word?

From a lecture on medical terminology:

"Medical vocabulary rewards the patient student of prefixes. Consider hypertension and hypotension—separated by two letters and a world of clinical meaning. Hyper- denotes above or excessive; hypo- denotes below or deficient. A patient with hypertension has dangerously high blood pressure; one with hypotension has dangerously low. The same pair appears in hyperthermia and hypothermia, hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia. The similarity of the prefixes to the ear—and their frequent proximity on the page—makes them a persistent source of transcription error. Nurses are trained to read them twice.

The prefixes are not, however, mere opposites in every construction. Hypothesis does not mean 'below-thesis' in any medically relevant sense; it derives from the older Greek meaning 'placed under,' as in the foundation of an argument. Etymology is a guide, not a rulebook."

The lecturer's discussion of hypothesis at the end serves primarily to: