Vocabulary College Prep Essentials — Set 1: In Context flashcards
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Learn deck · part of Vocabulary Level 8 · College Prep Essentials · written against: Our own grade placement (VOCABULARY-PLAN.md): word frequency (wordfreq, CC BY-SA 4.0) and editorial review; no publisher's grade or word list is reproduced. Updated 2026-10-10.
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For her 1930s radio talks on economics, the shy professor invented a ______, "Aunt Polly," a plain-spoken farm wife who explained tariffs in kitchen language.personaCharacter & Behavior
An invented character through which the professor speaks is a persona. A surrogate takes another's place or role, and Aunt Polly replaces no one; she is a voice the professor puts on. -
Raised on a fishing island, the novelist had a natural ______ with sailors and wrote about them as if they were her own family.affinityFeelings & Attitudes
Her sense of kinship with sailors is an affinity. Solidarity is unity in support of a shared cause, and she shares no cause with them, only a bond. -
Unlike the day and the year, which follow the earth's motions, the seven-day week is a human ______: ancient Rome kept an eight-day market week, and revolutionary France tried a ten-day one.constructThinking & Knowing
Something made by human thought and agreement rather than found in nature is a construct. A framework is the rules and ideas that thinking is organized around, and a paradigm is a field's model of how things work; neither names a custom with no basis in nature. -
Mercury and Venus take about 88 and 225 Earth days, ______, to travel once around the sun.respectivelySpeaking & Arguing
The two numbers match the two planets in the order they were named. Conversely would announce a reversal, and nothing here is reversed. -
Two teams studying the same lake reached opposite conclusions about its health because their ______ differed: one sampled the water once a year, the other every week, and each defended the reasoning behind its approach in print.methodologyActions & Effort
Their procedures for sampling, and the reasoning behind them, differ: their methodology. A modality is a single mode, as of treatment or sensing, and a paradigm is a whole field's model of how things work, not one team's approach. -
When John Snow had the handle of the Broad Street pump removed in 1854, he hoped to ______ a cholera outbreak by cutting off its supply of tainted water.stemChange & Growth
Shutting off the pump was meant to stop the outbreak's flow. Constrain means limiting what someone can do, not halting something that is spreading. -
A single farm's harvest barely moves the market, but the ______ output of a million farms in one season sets the price of wheat.aggregateSize & Amount
Output combined across a million farms is aggregate. Cumulative would mean adding up over time, and this total is summed across farms in a single season. -
When the best-run hospital cut its infection rate to under one case per thousand patients, its figure became the ______ that the other eleven hospitals in the network tried to match.benchmarkQuality & Judgment
One hospital's achieved level, used as the point of reference for the others, is a benchmark. A baseline is a starting measurement for tracking change in the same thing, a criterion is a test applied rather than a level to match, and a metric is the quantity measured, not the level reached. -
The hospital failed less from lack of money than from weak ______: its board met twice a year, approved every budget without questions and never checked who made key decisions.governanceSociety & Power
The problem lies in how the hospital was run: who decided and how the board checked them. Transparency is only openness about decisions, not the whole way of running an organization. -
Troy was rebuilt so many times that excavators found nine ______ cities stacked one atop another on the same hill.successiveNature & Time
Cities built one after another, each on the last, are successive. Cumulative would mean adding up into a growing total, not following in order.
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Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Senses, parts of speech and sense order checked against Merriam-Webster.com, the American Heritage Dictionary and the frequency-ordered Oxford, Longman and Cambridge learner's dictionaries; all definitions, notes and example sentences are original.
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