"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of."
This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.
Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?
I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.
Something often missing from vocabulary tests -- and arguably more impressive than raw, crystallized vocab -- is the ability to deduce the meaning of new words on the fly, whether from context or absent any context (in which case, the meaning is ascertained from roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc.). I'd love to see a test of this skill.
For instance, I doubt many people encounter the word "reck" in their daily lives. But I'd give props to someone whose brain would quickly draw the connection to the more frequently seen "reckless," thereby deducing that the word had something to do with caution or concern.
Similarly, your point has some validity. Most of the time, we don't acquire language through reading the dictionary; we acquire it primarily through context in the course of reading or conversation. This is why, when pressed to define words, we'll often reach for a string of synonyms, or else provide usage in sample sentences. I bet few people here, let alone anywhere, could render dictionary-acceptable definitions of 99% of the words they know.
(On the flipside, this is also why we forget most of the words we crammed in preparation for the SAT back in the day; we learned them completely out of context and in an artificial way).
This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.
Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?
I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.