There is no doubt about it. The best way to learn new words is to do it unconsciously. I don’t mean while you’re unconscious. I mean while you are unconscious of the fact that it is sinking in.
That is how I learnt the 30,000 words in my vocabulary by living in an English-speaking world, mother tongue. I just pick them up. But some of them may be misunderstood. Now, to misunderstand does not mean not to understand. To misunderstand is to understand but incorrectly.
The 5% mislearnt of all the words we “know” will be the least frequently used words, as the more frequently used words are less likely to be mislearnt. Some of the misunderstanding may live with all our lives, without knowing that we got them wrong.
Many English teachers think that this natural method of learning words in one’s own mother tongue can be used for a second language learning. They teach their students how to play the Guessing Game. “There is no time to look up in your dictionaries all the new words you e across,” they will say. “You have to practice guessing what the word means from the context.”
This method of guessing in a second language learning does not work. It may succeed in many cases, but results in hundreds or thousands of wrongly-guessed meanings of words.
And what’s more, there are more separate meanings than there are words themselves. Our learners’ dictionaries usually have many meanings. A good dictionary is what makes self-learning possible.
Don’t guess! Look it up!
【小题1】 It is certain that the best way to learn new words is .A．to learn them by oneselfB．to learn by living in an English-speaking world and using them frequentlyC．to guess them from the contextD．to get more separate meanings of each word【小题2】The underlined word “them” in Paragraph 2 refers to .A．the 30, 000 wordsB．English teachersC．misunderstood wordsD．frequently used words【小题3】Which of the following is most likely NOT true?A．Some of the words the writer knows must have been misunderstood.B．Most of the 30, 000 words the writer learned are frequently used ones.C．How many words the writer got wrong are not known.D．All the words the writer knows were learned by reading them.【小题4】It can be inferred that .A．when somebody is conscious, he or she usually can’t learn new words by heart B．we must use the words as often as possible in order to master themC．it’s the best way to learn new words that one should only guess their meanings from the contextD．only dictionaries can help us learn language well.D
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(答案→)D
解析：
【小题1】D总结归纳题。从最后一段“Don’t guess! Look it up！”及倒数第二段“...there are more separate meanings”可总结出学习新单词的最好方法是掌握每个单词更多的含义， 从而达到“do it unconsciously”(不经意间习得或理解)的境界
【小题2】A细节理解题。从第二段开头“That is how I learnt the 30,000 words in my vocabulary...”可知答案。
【小题3】D推理判断题。文章中并无依据表明作者所有的词汇都是通过阅读习得的。
【小题4】B推理判断题。从第三段中“...the more frequently used words are less likely to be mislearnt.”可以推断出正确理解并掌握词汇的方法是尽可能地多使用它们。