Monday, August 13, 2012

< V > TOEFL Vocabulary (88)


Crack (noun) 
to undergo partial breaking
A small pebble caused a crack in the windshield.

Cradle (noun) 
a place in which a thing begins or is nurtured in its infancy  
Ancient Greece, once the cradle of Western culture, is responsible for many of the moral
and scientific concepts that exist today.

Cramp (verb) 
to be retrained or confined
The Scots fought from a better position and the English were too cramped for space to
use their superior numbers. 

Cranium (noun) skull; the part of the head that encloses the brain  
It was believed in the nineteenth that bumps on a person’s cranium revealed his or her
personality.  

Cratered (verb) 
to exhibit bowl-shaped depressions caused by the impact of a meteorite
Mercury is in many ways similar to the Moon: its surface is heavily cratered and very
old.

Creaking (verb) 
a prolonged grating or squeaking sound
Yards creaking and making groaning sounds can be early warnings of slope failure.

Cremate (verb) 
to reduce a dead body to ashes by burning 
His last wish before he died was to be cremated and have his ashes spread over the
Pacific Ocean.  

Crevice (noun) 
a narrow opening resulting from a split or crack 
Found in waters all over the earth, octopuses like to hide in rocks and crevices and can
squeeze into tiny holes, as they have no bones. 

Criterion (noun) 
a standard of comparison
In order for doctors to know whether or not a baby is normal, there are certain criteria
or standards of judgment, but individual babies will vary somewhat from these
standards.

Critique (noun) 
evaluative and critical discourse
William Faulkner was a keen critique of the literature of his time.  

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