Word Power Made Easy

About this book

1 HOW TO TEST YOUR PRESENT VOCABULARY If you are the average adult, your vocabulary is barely one-and-one-half times as large as that of a child of ten. And you know only one fourth as many words as the average college sophomore. But that's the least of it— What is infinitely more significant is that you are now increasing your vocabulary at no more than one one hundredth your rate when you were in the lower grades of elementary school These accusations may sound insulting—but they are not intended to be. They are only an attempt to get you to face the facts about vocabulary development that educational testing has turned up in recent years. Let us examine some of these facts. According to a typical investigation by Professor Robert H. Seashore, chairman of the Department of Psychology of Northwestern University, the average child of ten knows the meanings of 34,300 different terms, and since his sixth year has been learning new words at the rate of 5000 a year. The results of a similar investigation, conducted by Columbia University Professor George W. Hartmann among the students of the Alabama Institute of Technology, show that the average college sophomore has a vocabulary of approximately two hundred thousand words. How do these figures compare with your own? I have obtained data on adult vocabularies by testing hundreds of students in the Adult Education Program of the City College of New York. These data show:...