Additional Material and Quizzes to practice


Vocabulary - Frankenstein Chapter 1 - 5

Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues

Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.

1. This man, whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition and could not bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and magnificence.

2. . . . his grief only became more deep and rankling when he had leisure for reflection, and at length it took so fast hold of his mind that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of an exertion.

3. During one of their walks a poor cot in the foldings of a vale attracted their notice as being singularly disconsolate, while the number of half-clothed children gathered about it spoke of penury in it worst shape.

4. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.

5. He then took a cursory view of the present state of the science and explained many of its elementary terms.

6. On the third day my mother sickened; her fever was accompanied by the most alarming symptoms, and the looks of her medical attendants prognosticated the worst.

7. She died calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death.

8. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business.

9. . . . and I found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that account the less valuable.

10. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively let to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.


Part II. Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.

____1. oblivion A. irritating
____2. rankling B. hastily done
____3. penury C. tireless
____4. caprice D. destroying completely
____5. cursory E. face
____6. prognosticated F. facial features with regard to revealing character
____7. countenance G. whim
____8. indefatigable H. predicted
____9. physiognomy I. extreme poverty
____10. obliterated J. State of being forgotten