Reading Academic Vocabulary Practice Test

Context clues are hints found within a sentence, paragraph, or passage that a reader can use to understand unfamiliar words. This approach relies on surrounding words and ideas to infer meaning, so you don’t have to stop and look up every new term. For example, in a sentence like “The arid desert stretched endlessly, and the plants barely survived,” the words “arid” and “desert” and the idea of dryness help you guess that arid means very dry.

Text features are elements like headings, captions, bold or italic text, and bullets that help you navigate and locate information, not specifically to deduce word meanings from context. Reasons are just explanations for why something happened, while facts are statements of information. Both don’t serve the same purpose as using hints in the surrounding text to figure out an unknown word, which is what context clues are designed to do.