英语四级阅读考题：词义判断题猜词方法

1. 说明线索

Jane is very obliging. She always reaches her hands out to those in need of help.

第二句是对前一句的补充说明。她对需要帮助的人总是伸出援手，Ann一定是很“乐于助人的”。

Capacitance, or the ability to store electric charge, is one of the most common characteristics of electronic circuits.

由后半句的解释我们很快猜出生词capacitance词义——电容量。

2. 同义词线索

And when joggers jog, they don’t run the streets.

从句子的后半部分可以看出，they指的是joggers，可见jog也是一种“跑步”的方式。

One night Mrs Rochester succeeded in setting the house on fire. Mr Rochester managed to lead the servants to safety and then went back into the burning mansion to rescue his wife.

第二个句子中的mansion是生词。从前后两个句子来看，我们不难发现mansion指的就是第一句中的house。

3. 用途线索

We like our new house because it has a few elms in the back yard that will give us shade and keep the house cooler.

通过elms的作用，能有阴凉使房屋凉爽些，我们可以猜测出elms是一种树。

Fishes live in water and have fins which help them to swim.

运用生活常识就能较为确切地判断出fins的词义是“鳍”。

4. 因果关系线索

She can’t play tennis now because she can’t find her white sneakers.

由于找不到这个“白色的sneakers”，所以无法打网球。可见sneakers是一种和打网球有关的东西。而从white和sneakers这个词的复数形式看，你也许已经猜出它们意思是“球鞋”了。

The lack of movement caused the muscles to weaken. Sometimes the weakness was permanent. So the player could never play the sport again.

从后面的结果“永远不能再运动”中，可以推测出 permanent的意思是“永久的”。

5、上下文线索

British cuisine has some of age in recent years as chefs combine the best of old and new.

如果我们无法判断cuisine的意思，而后面提到chefs，与厨师相关的当然是烹饪了，故可猜测cuisine“烹饪方式”的意思。

She read my letter slowly to the end and then tore it to shreds.

这个句子中的shreds是生词。但我们从整句来理解，“她慢慢地把我的信看完，然后把它撕成……”，从“撕成……”，我们可以猜出shreds是“碎片”的意思。

6、对比线索

She is usually prompt for all her classes, but today she arrived in the middle of her first class.

but表示意思的转折，因此可以看出but前后的意思是相反的。后半句说，她今天在第一节课上了一半时才来。反推回去，她平时应该是一向“准时”的了。

The pain on the cottage had peeled in a few places, otherwise they looked well kept.

句中peel可从otherwise后面的对比猜出是“脱落”之意。

7、顺序线索

After Ms Ellis put the letters in the envelope, she sealed it and put a stamp on it.

在发信时，先把信装入信封，封上口，然后贴上邮票，是合理的顺序，通过前后动作，不难看出seal是“封口”的意思。

接下来我们再做个练习，请看下面的文段：

After we had travelled for about twenty miles, there was still no sign of the town which was marked on the map. We were beginning to get worried. Then, without warning, the car stopped. A quick examination showed that we had run out of petrol. Although we had little food with us, only a few biscuits and some chocolate, we decided to spend the night in the car.

这一段中，假设petrol和biscuit两个词是生词，但我们可以从句子的前后文中推断出这两个词的意思。如文中提到汽车在没有任何出毛病的先兆时就突然停了，文中又有run our of——“用完”这个词组，因此可以推断出一定是汽油用完了，从而petrol的意思即可推测出。下边的biscuit是生词，但这一句的前半句提到了we had little food with us, biscuit和chocolate都是进一步补充说明是什么样的food，由此可见，这两样东西是“食品”。这时我们已经明白了大致的意思，不查词典，也不妨碍我们理解文章的意思。因此，就可以继续读下去，有时读到后面，又会发现前面出现的生词的意思在后面有了解释。

利用各种已知信息推测、判断词义是一项重要的阅读技巧。当然，猜测词义的方法不只这些，这也需要广大考生在平时的英语四六级阅读中自己去归纳、去掌握。在实践中，我们可以灵活运用，排除生词的障碍，顺利理解文章的思想内容，提高答题正确率。