Unit 6

Question 1

appellation

Answer 1

n. name

The discovery of the bones of a person with the appellation Kennewick Man in the state of Washington in 1996 has raised important questions about the earliest Americans.

Question 2

apposite

Answer 2

adj. strikingly appropriate and relevant

The writer searched two dictionaries and a thesaurus before finally finding the perfectly apposite word he was looking for.

Question 3

apprise

Answer 3

v. to inform

Nadine Cohodas’s biography of the blues singer Dinah Washington keeps the reader apprised of the racism black Americans had to endure.

Question 4

approbation

Answer 4

n. praise; approval

The Congressional Medal of Honor is the highest approbation an American soldier can receive.

Question 5

appropriate

Answer 5

v. to take possession for one’s own use; confiscate

The invading army appropriated supplies from the houses of the local people.

Question 6

apropos

Answer 6

adj. relevant

Apropos of nothing, the speaker declared that the purpose of life was to love.

Question 7

arabesque

Answer 7

n. ornate design featuring intertwined curves; a ballet position in which one leg is extended back while the other supports the weight of the body

The ballerina stunned the audience with her perfectly executed arabesque.

Question 8

archeology

Answer 8

n. the study of material evidence past human life.

Carbon-14 dating is of great use in archeology because it can help determine the age of specimens as old as 35,000 years.

Question 9

ardor

Answer 9

n. great emotion or passion

The twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens said, “It is the unknown that excites the ardor or scholars, who, in the known alone would shrivel up with boredom.”

Question 10

arduous

Answer 10

adj. extremely difficult; laborious

The task of writing a research paper is arduous, but if it is broken down into logical steps it becomes less daunting.