Many people are concerned about the number of high school graduates who are still "functionally illiterate." A person who is truly illiterate cannot read or write at all. A person who is functionally illiterate is one who cannot read or write at a level necessary to function effectively in some situation.
A very important aspect of being functionally literate for college is having an adequate vocabulary. You obviously cannot understand a book that uses a lot of words that you do not know, and as I shall explain later, you cannot speak or write well if you do not know the words that will convey the ideas you want to express. For these reasons, a major objective of this book is to increase your vocabulary.
At the end of this book is a list of about 5500 words and your goal should be to know the meaning of ALL 5500 words before you finish this book. These are not bizarre words chosen to display my knowledge of big words that are rarely used. On the contrary, these are the most common words in academic textbooks including college freshman courses. Accordingly, these are precisely the words that you need to know in order to be functionally literate for college. (Note: Although they are technically different "words", plurals such as book and books, or tenses, such as look and looked were not listed separately. Counting them increases the apparent size of your vocabulary but what is important is the number of different concepts that you know.)
One reason the vocabulary list encompasses a lot of very common words is simply to let you confirm for sure that you do indeed know them. You may find some that you do not know and you should give them high priority for learning. There is a more important reason. You may have heard of one easy way to differentiate between an optimist and a pessimist: When flying out over an ocean, the pessimist describes the gas tank as already being half empty; the optimist describes it as still being half full. In this sense, it is important to be an optimistic student.
The general point is this: No matter how much you know, there will always be more to learn. The pessimistic student focuses on how much s/he doesn't know and how hopeless it is to try to learn it all. In contrast, the optimistic student focuses on how much s/he already knows and how much s/he is adding to that knowledge. Suppose, for example, that you only knew 10 out of 1000 possible items. After studying long and hard, you learn 10 more items. To the pessimist, you only learned about one percent of the material; to the optimist, you increased your knowledge by 100 percent. Be excited about how much you do know and how that knowledge is growing rather than being overwhelmed by how much you don't know.
You probably do not remember your own childhood experiences, but surely you have heard a child calling out, "Watch me," when s/he is about to perform some act such as diving into a swimming pool. To the child, it doesn't matter that it is not an Olympic performance. . .s/he is proud to show even a little accomplishment. Most of us lost that excitement in learning probably as older kids told us how bad we were. But try to regain enthusiasm for learning just for the sake of learning. You don't have to know it all to be proud of how much you are learning.
This vocabulary assignment is a good place to start learning to be an optimistic student. Be impressed with how many words you know. (Actually, you probably know about 1000 more words that aren't listed because they are rarely used in textbooks.) You can always augment your vocabulary; educated people keep learning new words throughout their lives. Never mind that there are still thousands of words that you don't know. Take heart that you do know several thousand words and that you can easily add a few hundred more in order to be able to handle college-level studies.
The vocabulary lists words that you should have learned by high school (level 3) and words that are common at the college freshman level (level 4). You probably already know many of these words but you can benefit from greater familiarity with them. For this reason, I shall use many of these words in the text of this book in order to provide a context in which to practice them. My objectives are to illustrate how these words are useful and to insure that they are a part of your vocabulary.