TỪ VỰNG TOEIC unit 30

Unit 30 TOXI TEN/TENU TECHNI/TECHNO LONG IDIO AER/AERO CAD TRIB Words from Mythology and History Quiz 30-1 Quiz 30-2 Quiz 30-3 Quiz 30-4 Quiz 30-5 Review Quizzes 30 TOXI comes from the Greek and Latin words for “poison,” something the Greeks and Romans knew a good deal about Socrates died by taking a solution of poison hemlock, a flowering plant much like wild carrot that now also grows in the U.S Rome's enemy Mithridates, king of Pontus, was obsessed with poisons, experimented with them on prisoners, and tried to make himself immune to them by eating tiny amounts of them daily Nero's mother Agrippina poisoned several of her son's rivals to power—and probably did the same to her own husband, the emperor Claudius toxin A substance produced by a living organism (such as bacteria) that is highly poisonous to other organisms • Humans eat rhubarb stems without ill effects, while cattle may die from eating the leaves, which seem to contain two different toxins Long before chemists started creating poisons from scratch, humans were employing natural toxins for killing weeds and insects For centuries South American tribes have used the toxin curare, extracted from a native vine, to tip their arrows The garden flower called wolfsbane or monkshood is the source of aconite, an extremely potent toxin The common flower known as jimsonweed contains the deadly poison scopolamine And the castor-oil plant yields the almost unbelievably poisonous toxin called ricin Today we hear health advisers of all kinds talk about ridding the body of toxins; but they're usually pretty vague about which ones they mean, and most of these “toxins” wouldn't be called that by biologists toxicity The state of being poisonous; the degree to which something is poisonous • Though they had tested the drug on animals, they suspected the only way to measure its toxicity for humans was by studying accidental human exposures Toxicity is often a relative thing; in the words of a famous old saying, “The dose makes the poison.” Thus, it's possible to die from drinking too much water, and lives have been saved by tiny doses of arsenic Even though botulinum toxin is the most toxic substance known, it's the basic ingredient in Botox, which is injected into the face to get rid of wrinkles With some poisons, mere skin contact can be lethal; others are lethal when breathed into the lungs in microscopic amounts To determine if a chemical will be officially called a poison, researchers often use the “LD50” test: If 50 milligrams of the substance for every kilogram of an animal's body weight results in the death of 50% of test animals, the chemical is a poison But there are problems with such tests, and toxicity remains a very individual concept toxicology effect A science that deals with poisons and their • At medical school he had specialized in toxicology, hoping eventually to find work in a crime laboratory Even though most of us are aware of toxicology primarily from crime shows on TV, toxicologists actually most of their work in other fields Many are employed by drug companies, others by chemical companies Many work for the government, making sure the public is being kept safe from environmental poisons in the water, soil, and air, as well as unhealthy substances in our food and drugs These issues often have to with quantity; questions about how much of some substance should be considered dangerous, whether in the air or in a soft drink, may be left to toxicologists But occasionally a toxicology task may be more exciting: for instance, discovering that what looked like an ordinary heart attack was actually brought on by a hypodermic injection of a paralyzing muscle relaxant neurotoxin system A poisonous protein that acts on the nervous • From her blurred vision, slurred speech, and muscle weakness, doctors realized she had encountered a neurotoxin, and they suspected botulism The nervous system is almost all-powerful in the body: all five senses depend on it, as breathing, digestion, and the heart So it's an obvious target for poisons, and neurotoxins have developed as weapons in many animals, including snakes, bees, and spiders Some wasps use a neurotoxin to paralyze their prey so that it can be stored alive to be eaten later Snake venom is often neurotoxic (as in cobras and coral snakes, for example), though it may instead be hemotoxic (as in rattlesnakes and coppermouths), operating on the circulatory system Artificial neurotoxins, called nerve agents, have been developed by scientists as means of chemical warfare; luckily, few have ever been used TEN/TENU comes from the Latin tenuis, meaning “thin.” So to extend something is to stretch it, and lots of things get thin when they're stretched The ten- root is even seen in pretend, which once meant to stretch something out above or in front; that something came to be a claim that you were something that you actually weren't tenuous Having little substance or strength; flimsy, weak • It's a rather tenuous theory, and the evidence supporting it has been questioned by several researchers Something tenuous has been stretched thin and might break at any time A person with a tenuous hold on his sanity should be watched carefully If a business is only tenuously surviving, it will probably go bankrupt in the next recession If there seems to be only a tenuous connection between two crimes, it means the investigators have more work to attenuated Thinned or weakened • The smallpox shot is an injection of the virus in an attenuated form too weak to produce an actual case of smallpox A friendship can become attenuated if neither person bothers to keep in touch Radio waves can become attenuated by the shape of the landscape, by foliage, by atmospheric conditions, and simply by distance Factory workers and rock musicians often use noise-attenuating ear plugs to save their hearing To attenuate something isn't to stop it, just to tone it down extenuating Partially excusing or justifying • A good college rarely accepts someone who has dropped out of high school twice, but in his case there were extenuating circumstances, including the death of both parents Extenuating is almost always used today before “circumstances.” Extenuating circumstances are an important concept in the law If you steal to feed your children, you're naturally less guilty than someone who steals just to get richer; if you kill someone in self-defense, that's obviously an extenuating circumstance that makes your act different from murder Juries will usually consider extenuating circumstances (even when they're instructed not to), and most judges will listen carefully to an argument about extenuating circumstances as well And they work outside of the courtroom as well; if you miss your daughter's performance in the middle-school pageant, she may forgive you if it was because you had to race Tigger to the vet's emergency room distended Stretched or bulging out in all directions; swelled • All the children's bellies were distended, undoubtedly because of inadequate nutrition or parasites Before giving you a shot, the nurse may wrap a rubber tube around your upper arm to distend the veins When the heart isn't pumping properly, the skin of the feet and ankles may become distended A doctor who notices that an internal organ has become distended will always want to find out the cause As you can see, distended tends to be a medical term retribution punishment Something given in payment for a wrong; • The victims' families have been clamoring for retribution, sometimes even interrupting the trial proceedings With its prefix re-, meaning “back,” retribution means literally “payback.” And indeed we usually use it when talking about personal revenge, whether it's retribution for an insult in a high-school corridor or retribution for a guerrilla attack on a government building But retribution isn't always so personal: God takes “divine retribution” on humans several times in the Old Testament, especially in the great Flood that wipes out almost the entire human race And retribution for criminal acts, usually in the form of a prison sentence, is taken by the state, not the victims Quiz 30-4 A Indicate whether the following pairs have the same or different meanings: cadence / musical ending same _ / different _ attribute / donate same _ / different _ decadent / morally declining same _ / different _ tributary / small lake same _ / different _ cadaver / bodily organ same _ / different _ tribute / praise same _ / different _ cadenza / side table same _ / different _ retribution / revenge same _ / different _ Answers B Fill in each blank with the correct letter: a tributary b retribution c cadenza d cadence e attribute f cadaver g decadent h tribute The soloist's _ was breathtaking, and the audience burst into applause as he played his final notes The insult had left her seething, and within minutes she had begun planning her terrible _ As _ to his huge achievements, the university announced that it would be naming the new science building for him It was a major _ to the Amazon, but until 1960 no one but the native Indians had ever attempted to reach its source Every time it seemed as if the piece was reaching its final _, the harmony would shift and the music would continue Her roommate's family struck her as _, with the younger generation spending its huge allowances on expensive and unhealthy pleasures In those days grave robbers would dig up a _ at night after the burial and deliver it to the medical school He wants to _ his success entirely to his own brains and energy, forgetting that not everyone is born with $30 million to play with Answers Words from Mythology and History halcyon (1) Calm and peaceful (2) Happy and successful • She looks back fondly on those halcyon childhood days when she and her sisters seemed to inhabit a magical world where it was always summer For the Greeks, the halcyon was a bird (probably the kingfisher) that was believed to nest on the Mediterranean Sea around the beginning of winter, and had the power to quiet the rough December waters around Sicily for about two weeks—the “halcyon days.” Thus the adjective halcyon came to mean calm and serene Today people especially use it to describe a golden time in their past meander (1) To follow a winding course (2) To wander slowly without a specific purpose or direction • A little-used trail meanders through the mountains, crossed by cowpaths onto which hikers often stray and get lost Now and then, geography contributes an ordinary word to the language The Greek word maiandros came from the Maiandros River (now the Menderes River) in western Turkey, which rises in the mountains and flows 240 miles into the Aegean Sea Meandering is a natural tendency especially in slowmoving rivers on flat ground with fine-grained sand, and the Maiandros was well known for its many windings and wanderings Roads and trails, like rivers, can be said to meander, but so can relaxed music, lazy writing, and idle thoughts oedipal Relating to an intense emotional relationship with one's mother and conflict with one's father • Already on her first visit she sensed a tense oedipal situation, with her boyfriend and his father barely getting through dinner without coming to blows In Greek mythology, the king of Thebes, in response to a dreadful prophecy, abandoned his infant son Oedipus, who was then brought up by shepherds Grown to manhood, Oedipus slew his father almost accidentally, not recognizing him, and then married his mother When the shameful truth was discovered, the mother committed suicide and Oedipus blinded himself and went into exile The psychiatrist Sigmund Freud invented the term Oedipus complex to mean a sexual desire that a child normally feels toward the parent of the opposite sex, along with jealous feelings toward the parent of the same sex In Freud's theory (not accepted by everyone today), lingering oedipal feelings are an essential source of adult personality disorder, and can result in choosing a spouse who closely resembles your father or mother ostracize consent To exclude someone from a group by common • Back in the 1950s she had been ostracized by her fellow country-club members for her radical political beliefs In the ancient democracy of Athens, citizens were permitted to vote once a year to exile anyone who they thought might pose a problem to the city-state The man with the most votes was banished for ten years, even if no one had ever made a single charge against him Voting was done on ostraka—bits of broken pottery, the Greek equivalent of scrap paper—and the process was known as ostrakizein Today the most common kind of ostracism is exclusion from a social group It can be especially painful in school: no more sleepovers, no more party invitations, just lots of whispering behind your back paean (1) A song of joy, praise, tribute, or triumph (2) A work that praises or honors its subject • At his retirement party, the beloved president was treated to paeans from friends and employees to his years at the head of the company Originally in ancient Greece, a paian was a choral hymn to Apollo as the god of healing More generally, it could be a hymn of thanksgiving, as when, in Homer's Iliad, the followers of Achilles sing a paean on the death of his enemy Hector Paeans could be sung at banquets, at public funerals, to armies departing for battle and fleets leaving the harbor, and in celebrations of military victories philippic A speech full of bitter condemnation; a tirade • Every few days he launches another philippic against teenagers: their ridiculous clothes, their abominable manners, their ghastly music In 351–350 B.C., the great Greek orator Demosthenes delivered a series of speeches against King Philip II of Macedon, the so-called philippikoi logoi (“speeches regarding Philip”) Three centuries later, in 44–43 B.C., the great Roman orator Cicero delivered a series of speeches against Mark Antony, which soon became known as the philippica or orationes philippicae, since they were modeled on Demosthenes' attacks Splendid though both men's speeches were, Demosthenes was eventually exiled by the Macedonians, and Cicero was executed at Mark Antony's orders satyr A man with a strong desire for many women • Still drinking and womanizing at the age of 70, he likes to think of himself as a satyr rather than an old goat Satyrs, the minor forest gods of Greek mythology, had the face, torso, and arms of a man, the ears and tail of a goat, and two goatlike legs Fond of the pleasures associated with Dionysus (or Bacchus), the god of wine, they were full of playful and sometimes violent energies, and spent much of their time chasing the beautiful nature spirits known as nymphs Satyrs show up over and over in ancient art The Greek god Pan, with his reed pipes and mischievous delight in life, had the appearance and character of a satyr but greater powers Notice how satyr is pronounced; it's quite different from satire zealot A fanatical supporter • My girlfriend's father is a religious zealot, so I always find excuses not to have dinner at their house In the 1st century A.D., a fanatical sect arose in Judaea to oppose the Roman domination of Palestine Known as the Zealots, they fought their most famous battle at the great fortress of Masada, where 1,000 defenders took their own lives just as the Romans were about to storm the fort Over the years, zealot came to mean anyone who is passionately devoted to a cause The adjective zealous may describe someone who's merely dedicated and energetic (“a zealous investigator,” “zealous about combating inflation,” etc.) But zealot (like its synonym fanatic) and zealotry (like its synonym fanaticism) are used disapprovingly—even while Jews everywhere still honor the memory of those who died at Masada Quiz 30-5 Fill in each blank with the correct letter: a paean b philippic c halcyon d meander e satyr f zealot g oedipal h ostracize In those _ summers, he and his cousins spent every day sailing and swimming in the blue Wisconsin lakes His most famous speech was a _ on the Vietnam War delivered on the floor of the Senate in 1967 At her 40th birthday party, her best friend delivered a glowing _ that left her in tears Meeting him again after five years, she was dismayed to discover that he'd become a religious _ who could talk about no other subject Though he hasn't been convicted of anything yet, it's obvious that the community is going to _ him She describes her uncle as a _, who behaves outrageously around every young woman he meets at a party The paths _ through the lovely woods, curving back on themselves in long loops When psychologists refer to _ behavior, they may think of a four-yearold boy competing with his father for his mother's attention Answers Review Quizzes 30 A Choose the closest definition: cadaver a patient b skeleton c zombie d corpse longueur a couch b distance c boring section d length retribution a gift b revenge c response d duplication pyrotechnic a dazzling b fire-starting c boiling d passionate elongate a continue b smooth over c close off d lengthen distended a overturned b expired c swollen d finished tenuous a weak b sturdy c contained d stubborn zealot a spokesman b leader c joker d fanatic neurotoxin a brain wave b nerve poison c brain virus d antidepressant 10 aerate a fly b inflate c supply with oxygen d glide Answers B Fill in each blank with the correct letter: a technophobe b idiopathic c cadence d oedipal e technocrat f idiom g anaerobic h extenuating i decadent j attenuated The _ virus should be incapable of actually causing disease A piece of music that doesn't end with a firm _ leaves most audiences tense and unsatisfied When you use an _ like “losing your edge” or “dressed to kill” in class, your foreign students are just going to be puzzled She does a lot of _ muscle training, but just running for the bus will leave her panting Getting a _ like him to start using a cell phone would be a major achievement The patient's account of her symptoms was so sketchy that for now her condition is just being called _ His fiancée looks just like his mother, and we joke with him that he's never gotten through his _ period The mayor is a _ who thinks all the city's problems can be fixed by technology and rational management The scene in the hip downtown nightclubs just seemed _ and unhealthy to her 10 If you're caught stealing a flat-screen TV, the fact that you can't afford to buy one doesn't count as an _ circumstance Answers C Indicate whether the following pairs have the same or different meanings: cadenza / solo section same _ / different _ idiosyncrasy / oddity same _ / different _ halcyon / delightful same _ / different _ toxin / vitamin same _ / different _ tribute / praise same _ / different _ ostracize / shun same _ / different _ meander / wind same _ / different _ aerial / lively same _ / different _ toxicity / poisonousness same _ / different _ 10 technophile / apparatus same _ / different _ Answers ... will always want to find out the cause As you can see, distended tends to be a medical term Quiz 30- 1 A Fill in each blank with the correct letter: a attenuated b toxicity c extenuating d toxicology... society by technical experts.” Technocracy grew into a movement during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when politicians and financial institutions were being blamed for the economic disaster, and... (They also suggested that dollars could be replaced by “energy certificates” representing energy units called ergs.) Today technocrat and technocratic are still popular words for experts with a