What is a reliable strategy to determine the meaning of an academic term when encountered in a passage?

• A. Use context clues and any definitions, glossaries, or surrounding sentences to deduce meaning.
• B. Read only the sentence containing the term and guess.
• C. Rely on a dictionary that is not in the text.
• D. Ignore the term and continue reading.

Answer: (A)

Determining the meaning of an unfamiliar academic term is most reliably done by using context clues and any nearby definitions or glossaries. When you encounter a term, look at how the surrounding sentences describe or illustrate it, and check if a sentence defines it or provides an example. If there’s a glossary or a labeled box in the text, use that as your anchor to see the term’s precise sense in this passage. This approach ties the term directly to the author’s specific ideas and keeps you from assuming a general meaning that may not fit here. Relying on a dictionary outside the text can give a broad definition that doesn’t match how the term is used in this context, while ignoring the term leaves you with gaps in understanding. So, use the clues and any within-text definitions or glossaries to deduce meaning, and confirm that your inferred meaning fits the surrounding information.