Word Smart II. [antikvár]

About Word Smart I We wrote the first Word Smart thinking it would be our only vocabulary book. Most vocabulary books include too many words that people rarely use, and not enough of the words people actually encounter in school or in their daily life. For Word Smart, we wanted only the most important words in an educated vocabulary, the words intelligent people truly need to know to do well in school and in their careers. Here's what we said on the back cover of the first Word Smart: Improving your vocabulary is important, but where do you start? The English language has hundreds of thousands of words. To find out which words you absolutely need to know, The Princeton Review researched the vocabularies of educated adults. We analyzed newspapers from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, magazines from Time to Scientific American, and books from current bestsellers to the classics. We threw out the words that most people know and focused on the words that people misunderstand or misuse. From these, we selected the 823 words that appeared most frequently. We wrote these words in 1988. Since then nearly a quarter-million people have purchased Word Smart. Many people, having learned the 823 words in the first volume, did not want to stop there. They asked us for other important words they should know. So we set out to collect another batch of words. We went through the same research process we did when compiling our first volume. We still concentrated on the words that occurred most frequently, but there were some important differences in the way we made our final selection. The World Has Changed In the first place, the world has changed a lot since 1988. With the international and end-of-century upheavals of recent years, many political and religious words gained increasing usage. Increasing globalization made us more aware of foreign languages, and as a result many foreign words and phrases gained popularity.