Passage of the Day - Set 1

You all have heard and read "Word of the Day" or "Question of the Day". This initiative is a bit different. This one is "Passage of the Day". And you must be wondering - "what does that even mean?"

What does "Passage of the Day" entail?

Every day I will take up a passage from say Wall Street Journal or New York Times or some other trusted publication and I will demonstrate how I do one or more of the following:
• how I understand the meaning or
• how I infer meaning of a certain word or
• how I determine linkages between different parts of that passage.

How will it benefit you?

My hope is that as you read through one such "passage" every day, you will develop and sharpen the core skill of "comprehension" that will help you in all sections of verbal.
That's my hope - rest the time will tell the results!

One more thing before I wrap this up - the "passage" may contain just one sentence or two sentences or more than 2 sentences or maybe even a typical passage.

Passage of the day - Feb 3

So let's get going for today's "Passage of the Day".
Here is a sentence from yesterday's issue of Wall Street Journal.


Let's understand the meaning of this sentence.

The author first presents a fact -
• Students from foreign countries are applying to U.S colleges for the coming year. In fact the applications are either stable or have even risen.
Then he presents some outcome from this fact, as is evident by the use of verb-ing modifier - alleviating.

Now here comes the part that some of you may be unsure about.

Are you little unclear about what the word "alleviate" means? If yes, then don’t worry. You do not need to know the meaning of this word in order to understand the meaning of this sentence. You can infer its meaning from the sentence itself.

Let's see how:

So notice how even if we did not know the meaning of the word "alleviate", we were able to infer its meaning from the context of the sentence.

Takeaway

If you focus on the meaning of each part of the sentence, you will not face problems even if you do not know the exact meaning of a certain word - in this case alleviate.


And now just because we can check the meaning of this word, let's do a quick check: alleviate means "reduce, ease, relieve" as in "use ice to alleviate the swelling".

So that's it for today. I will see you tomorrow with the Passage for the day for Feb 4.

Regards,

Payal