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1100 Words you need to know | |
Barrons
Authors: Murray Broomberg and Melvin Gordon
380 pages.
£8.00
IBSN 0812016203
The book is arranged as a 46 week course, and you learn a batch of new words every day of the course (you get weekends off). Just to make sure that you know where you are, each exercise is marked with the day and the week - e.g. Week 37 Day 5. The total is not really 1100 words, because you also get your 'idiom of the day' at the bottom, and some days are revision days when you are tested on words you have learned earlier. In fact you get 920 words and 200 idioms. The last hundred or so pages of the book are the index, answers, a large final test and something called the 'Panorama of words'. The Panorama of words gives short extracts from speeches, books, magazines and other public (almost entirely US) documents, each containing one of the words you have learned. This feature is popular with some users, while others are less sure.
Some variety has been put into the revision tests which are sometimes gap fills, sometimes vocabulary exersises asking you to match your word with a synonym or opposite and so on, but most of the daily exercises have a standard format which takes up one page of (quite large) type. There are no pictures. The day's work starts with a reading exercise. This paragraph might be on anything from the fashion industry to US war heroes, but it always contains the target vocabulary of the day. After that you have sample sentences with a blank space in which you have to put the newly learned word, and after that an exercise of matching the words with their definitions. The idiom of the day is at the bottom of the page. Some of these are now thirty years old, and could use updating.
Who is this book for? Anyone who would like to add another 920 words to their vocabulary. Considering that an English person educated to university standard will know 80,000 to 100,000 words, this might not seem like a lot, but the words are well chosen. They are not words you come across every day, but they add depth to your vocabulary and help to increase fluency and understanding. This book is also very well suited to a self-learner who wants to give 15 to 20 minutes every day to vocabulary.
Verdict: You will learn 920 useful words, and 200 somewhat less useful idioms.
Assessment 8/10