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Answer the following questions. Your answers should be clear and short.What are contextual clues? Guess the meaning of the words underlined in the following sentences and tell what contextual clues have helped you in arriving at the meaning. (a) Their greatest fear was of a conflagration, since fire would destroy their flimsy wooden settlement before help could arrive. (b) As the fighting on all fronts reached its peak, the economy neared its nadir.
【正确答案】：

CONTEXT MAY PROVE EXTREMELY VALUABLE IN GUESSING THE MEANINGS OF NEW WORDS. IN MANY CASES, WHEN A NEW WORD (THOUGHT TO BE) APPEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE AUTHOR GENERALLY MANAGES TO GIVE HINTS WHICH MIGHT HELP THE READERS TO GRASP THE CONCEPT OR UNDERSTAND THE IDEA. THESE ARE CALLED CONTEXTUAL CLUES. SENTENCE (A) USES THE SYNONYMY TO EXPLAIN THE NEW WORD "CONFLAGRATION". SENTENCE (B) USES THE ANTONYMY TO EXPLAIN THE WORD “NADIR”.

【题目解析】：语境可能在猜测新词含义方面很有价值。在许多时候，当一个新词第一次出现，作者通常给予帮助读者掌握概念和思想的暗示。这就是语境线索。句子(a)中，逗号后的句子“fire”用来解释说明前面的“conflagration”。句子(b)用反义词来解释“nadir”的意思。