Hey everyone, I'm Justin, and I am super excited to
tell you about something amazing that happened to me today! So I was . . .
Oh, hey. It's another text from Liz. Ooh, she's texting her mom. Let's see what's up.
Huh, okay. So Liz tells her mom that Matt has a lot of followers, and now her mom is talking
about how many people are on his track team. I'm confused, and it looks like Liz is too.
Okay, let's take a look at this conversation. I think Liz's mom is misunderstanding Liz's comment
here. She said, "Matt has like 200 followers." Why do you think Liz's mom would start talking about
the relay team after Liz said this? We need to take a look at the context. True, we are talking
about a relay race here. Matt is the first runner on the relay team, so of course there would be
runners following him after. But let's take a look at Liz's comment again. She mentions followers
after she says saw his post online. Love Matt. So is Liz talking about the relay race anymore? No,
she's not. Now she's talking about Matt's posts online. So when she says he has 200 followers,
she's talking about how many people follow him online, not how many people follow him in a race.
Also, that'd be pretty ridiculous if there were 200 people on the relay team. Come on, Mom.
Oh okay, here we go. Now Liz's mom has reread her text message
and understood the context. Now she gets it.
You know, talking about context and getting information from the surrounding sentences has got
me thinking about this text conversation that I had with my uncle Gabe the other day. Let's take a
look at it. See if you could figure out why I was confused and how context can help you understand
meaning. So my uncle Gabe texts me and he says that he's going on vacation next week,
and I'm like great. Pretty simple, right? My uncle Gabe is an engineer.
He's been working on running shoes recently with breakthrough materials.
Here's where it gets tricky. You and I both know that this sentence means that the weather is
gonna be bad, because one of the meanings of forecast is future weather conditions. So when
you say the forecast looks awful, you mean that the weather is going to be cold and rainy and bleh
and not very good for a nice sunny beach vacation, right? But here's where it gets tricky. There's
another meaning for the word forecast. Forecast can also be used when you're talking about sales.
So instead of saying that the weather in the future is going to be bad, the sales in the future
are going to be bad. So for example, if you were saying that the forecast on these new shoes looks
awful, that means you're about to sell a bunch of shoes. But someone crunched some numbers and they
don't think that you're going to sell too many. So which meaning is my uncle Gabe talking about?
I don't know. I don't have enough information from the surrounding sentences
to let me know which meaning of forecast he's using. So I text him again and ask him.
There we go. Now I know he's talking about the weather. That's pretty unlucky that his vacation
weather is going to be bad, though. Maybe it'll change. Fingers crossed. So you see, even if
you don't know the meaning of a word, or maybe even if you do but you're not sure what meaning
is being used, check the surrounding sentences for information that reinforces the meaning. That's
called checking for context for more information. Thanks for spending some time with me today. You
will learn so much more about interpreting words and phrases in context through your assigned
reading and online practice sets. And until next time friends, remember to always be clever.