1.

The Sense of the Sentence

The reader has to get the general sense or meaning of the sentence to get some ideas about one
unfamiliar term. To do this, he has to ask questions about the sentence. The question plus the answer
must have some connection with the unfamiliar term.

Ex: 1. You cannot easily change the stand of an obdurate person.

Question: What can you say about a person who does not change?

Answer: He is not flexible.

Obdurate means not flexible.

2. The strong winds will make your hair appear scraggly.

Question: What becomes of hair that is not combed?

Answer: It is not orderly. It is untidy, or disheveled.

Scraggly means irregular, unkempt, disorderly, untidy

2.Use of synonyms
Synonyms are words that have the same or nearly the same meaning. The presence of the
synonym in the sentence is signaled by a comma, dash, parentheses, a link or series of synonymous
terms, or a restatement of the difficult term in more familiar words in a phrase, clause, or another
sentence.

Ways of recognizing synonyms:

1. By commas to separate the appositive from the other words in the sentence.

Ex: The Volvo, a car, costs a million pesos.

The conundrum, a riddle, is one of the ancient forms of Philippine poetry.

By parentheses

Ex: She wants to establish a liaison (a close bond) with the officers.

Give me the penultimate (next to the last) syllable of the word.

By restatement or expression of the word in a more familiar term

Restatement through an appositive:

Ex: A clergyman, a priest, wields tremendous influence on every member of the

community.

Restatement through a phrase:

Ex: The clergyman saying the mass in the new chapel is wearing a white robe with a purple.
 Restatement through a clause:

Ex: A clergyman, who considers the church his permanent residence, gave me a golden
rosary.

3.Use of Examples
Study these examples to discover what their similarities are, then associate these similarities
with the word he

does not understand, to know exactly what the unfamiliar term means. The comma is the
punctuation mark used to signal the presence of examples in the sentence.

Ex: Novels, poetry, drama, short stories, and folk tales belong to a fictional genre.

genre- category or class of literary works

The gadgets he was allowed to examine are: hair dryer, mixer, heater and polisher.

gadgets- devices to help you do a task

4.Use of Comparison or Analogy

• Comparing the difficult term to another word will reveal similarities that can be used by the
reader as clues to the meaning of the difficult term. Expressions such as: similar to, like, as…as
and the same are what the text uses in comparing things, places and persons.

Example

• The lion is as ferocious as a crocodile that is capable of gobbling up a whole human being.