Friday, March 2, 2012


There's more to Building Verbal Skills than just learning words and building a fund of vocabulary. If one wants to master verbal ability, one must be able to ideate. Ideation can be practiced by associations, which , in turn, will help construct analogies.

Let's, for a start, start ideating with the word,'explode'. Explode in its common sense anyone knows, but one may not know its special usage in the context of a theory or story.What does it mean to say, "Darwin exploded the myth of creationism?" Someone once hypothesized that god created humans.Many accepted it as a theory.The theory of creationism. Ages later many took the theory to be true. Thus the theory became a myth.The myth of creationism.Then came Darwin. Charles Darwin. He hypothesized that humans were not created,but had evolved from other forms of life.He found some evidence to support his hypothesis. It became a theory. The theory of evolutionism.Many now take it as absolute truth.It has become a myth. The myth of evolutionism.Darwin exposed the flaws in creationism and thus destroyed it.Darwin exploded the myth.In other words, he debunked the theory. (To debunk is to expose the weakness.)

Now, look at the following analogy:
The first pair of words is, in a way, the same in meaning as the second pair.To debunk a theory is to invalidate it. To explode a myth is to invalidate it. Suppose your theory is a building; then, when you debunk the theory, you demolish(cut down to the ground)the building.If your building is a tree, when you raze(demolish)the building you fell the tree.If you take your tree as an opponent or enemy, when you fell the tree you level your opponent. Hence,
BUILDING:RAZE is the same as TREE :FELL is the same as OPPONENT:LEVEL

Now, let's revert to the word fell. We generally fell trees, i.e., cut them down to the ground to get timber.The opposite of fell can be erect or build. As we already know,fell is to cut down trees. That way we get timber, in the same way as we get stone by quarrying. Hence,
FELL : TIMBER is similart to QUARRY : STONE

Let's examine this word STONE a little more. Did you know the seed of the fruit DATE is called stone, just as we call the seed or nut of an OAK tree ACORN? An acorn grows into an oak, just as a CATERPILLAR grows into a MOTH or BUTTERFLY, or, much as a ROE(fish egg) grows into a SALMON (fish). So we have analogies like



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riz said...

good informative post.. thanks dude

john dev said...

Improving Verbal through listening sounds good!It is necessary GRE Prep Test .Thanks.