Package 4 – Word roots

Many academic words in English are formed using ancient Greek and Latin roots. You may have already learnt some of them. Mastering the meanings of these commonly used “word-parts” will help you work out and remember the meaning of unfamiliar words when you see them in context.

Roots can be at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word.

Activity 1       Roots and their meanings

These tables contain English roots of Latin and Greek origin. This activity is designed to assess your knowledge of roots. Try to complete the tables by typing in the roots or meanings in the spaces provided.

Activity 2         Inferring meaning
One of the effective ways of working out the meaning of new or unfamiliar words is to study their contexts. This activity helps you to practise how to do that.

Read the article “Mooncakes in moderation” and then complete the table. You may use a dictionary if you wish. Fill in the column ‘Context’, which may help you to work out not only the definition of the word but also the meaning of the underlined word part. The first one has been done for you.

Mooncakes are an essential part of the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations in Hong Kong, though indulging in them has never been advocated by dieticians.

A 185 gram mooncake is a dense concoction of ingredients including lotus paste, egg yolks, fat and sugar and contains 840 calories. This is the equivalent of 3.5 bowls of rice, 18 teaspoons of sugar or 10 teaspoons of oil. Two salted egg yolks contain 1,238 milligrams of cholesterol, four times the American Heart Association’s suggested daily intake for an adult.

The Department of Health advises people to eat mooncakes “in moderation”. “People in good health should eat no more than half a mooncake a day. For people suffering from chronic illnesses, especially those with high cholesterol levels, hypertension and diabetes, mooncakes should be avoided,” according to a department spokesman. Some bakers have introduced a low-fat version of these local delicacies for the health conscious traditionalists who want to jui yuet or “chase the moon”.

Unfortunately, the department said that the so-called “snowy” mooncakes - which have pastry comprised of cooked glutenous flour – are not much better, as they contain substantial amounts of fat and sugar. A healthier, yet no less delicious variation is the mooncake consisting of red bean paste and pine nuts.

The health department spokesman did add that if people only have mooncakes once a year to celebrate the festival, they do not need to be paranoid about their health.