# Improve Your Vocabulary to Boost Your SAT Score Senior high school seniors in many cases are concerned about if they'll score high enough on the SAT (formerly called the Scholastic Assessment Test) to gain admission to a top-rated university. Their concern is unwarranted, however, because new books which trace the real history of words are now on the market. Reading one of these simple books will greatly enhance the student's vocabulary and allow him or her to acquire a high score on the Critical Reading (formerly Verbal) percentage of the SAT. ![](https://i.imgur.com/NKMtbNQ.jpg) A guide on the real history of words will enable the reader to master hundreds, even thousands, of words without having to memorize them, at least consciously. To illustrate: not likely many individuals who haven't studied Latin have trained with a believed that fug- is the basis of twenty or even more words, such as for instance fugitive, refugee, centrifugal, and nidifugous. From your common knowledge, you realize a fugitive "flees or runs away"; a refugee "flees from his or her country"; and a centrifugal force "flees from the center." If you encounter nidifugous on the SAT, you may not know what the word itself means, but you realize that it has something related to "fleeing." Consequently, of the multiple choice items, surely among the possible answers could have something related to "fleeing, running away, or escaping." Psychologists called this step "associative bonding," similar to mortar between bricks. For example, you will see that nidifugous originates from Latin nidus, nest, and describes a bird, such as a chicken, turkey, grouse, or pheasant that "flees" the nest right after hatching, as opposed to robins, wrens, and sparrows that must stay static in the nest until they're mature enough to fly and look for their particular food. These birds are called nidicolous, where in fact the contrasting element is from colere, to dwell, and which gives us the word "colony." ![](https://i.imgur.com/unVUYQl.jpg) The word centrifugal may be contrasted with centripetal, this means "seeking the center." In cases like this the pet- is from petere, "to seek." Centripetal [ผลไม้ ภาษาอังกฤษ](https://pieceofenglish.com/ผลไม้-ภาษาอังกฤษ/) is then concatenated, or associated with, appetite, a relatively unrelated word. However, when one has an appetite, he or she seeks food, knowledge, or other desires, just as a centripetal force seeks the center. Many words have Latin origins, including the word granum, meaning seed or grain, which yields granary, grange, granite, granular, granule; pomegranate (a seeded or granulated fruit); grenade; engrain, filigree, garner; grain, gravy; and German Einkorn shares the normal meaning with the Latin element, and means "one-seeded wheat." There are the Romance cognates, in that the common element's equivalent is listed in the five major Romance languages: French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. For the fugere family, there are respectively fuir, fugi, fuggire, fugir, and fugar.