Determine the Meaning of Words and Phrases
Using the Context of a Passage to Determine the Meaning of Words With Multiple Meanings, Unfamiliar and Uncommon Words and Phrases, and Figurative Expressions
Figurative language in reading passages on the MTTC test usually refers to comparisons like similes, metaphors and personifications. Authors use these comparisons to catch the readers’ attention and to show a particular attitude towards the subject. Read, for example, this brief paragraph:
Gun control in America has been a source of controversy for many years. In the late 1980s, however, the once distant thunder of concern has become a raging hailstorm. The single bullets that killed one president and wounded another have become the entire magazines that decimated a schoolyard in California and killed hundreds in Washington, D.C. Many Americans are now demanding that their representatives in Washington provide safe federal shelters from this destructive storm.
A metaphor — an implied comparison — is used in this paragraph to liken the growing calls for gun control legislation to a storm that begins with distant thunder but gets louder and fiercer as the storm gets closer and closer. Just as a hail storm would hurt anyone caught in it without shelter, the writer suggests that politicians who do nothing to solve the problem may get hurt at the polls. Understanding figurative language is often more difficult than understanding a single unfamiliar word. It may require several readings. During these readings, you should first try to get a mental picture of the literal situation the author presents and then try to think of the associations that such a picture suggests.
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