This is a question millions of test candidates seek an answer to every year. Now you are one of those people. Congratulations! You have made the decision to take the most widely used English language exam for academic purposes. Your TOEFL score will be an indicator of your linguistic proficiency as well as your capability of setting and achieving goals. Doing well in the TOEFL test you can accomplish various objectives: You will boost your self-confidence, your friends, family and colleagues will look up to you and of course your career chances will increase. Research shows that your professional success — no matter what industry you work in — largely depends on your command of the English language. That's why your employer or university, your study grant organization or any other potential partner requires you to take the TOEFL test and have your language and communication skills assessed.

So, how do you get prepared for the TOEFL test? Let's examine this question and find the answers together. First of all, you should be aware of the fact that there is no short cut to a high TOEFL score — you have to earn it. Also, it's important for you to focus on the bigger picture when you prepare for the TOEFL test — you shouldn't just learn for the sake of the exam. Instead, make it your goal to gain a higher command of the English language because this is an asset you will benefit from throughout your life. When you aim at improving your communication skills on a regular basis you will be ready to take an English language test any time. As a matter of fact, every time you use your knowledge of English (listening to an audio tape, reading a newspaper article, writing an email or speaking English to another person) you pass a «mini-test» of the English language. Before you take the TOEFL or any other English language exam you have to prove to yourself that you are capable of learning English and that you know how to use the language effectively. There a lots of ways you can assess and improve your English yourself. Learning a language is a bit like practising a sport: The more you practise and train the better are your chances to gain a top position in a competition. Before we go into the details of your individual TOEFL test preparation program we should establish some fundamentals — some basic facts that are essential to your success. Let's be honest — most people don't like examinations or tests. You probably remember how you used to feel when your teacher announced yet another English test paper and you had to cram all those grammar rules into head knowing that most the information was rather useless for your future career anyway. Getting poor grades in English at school reduced your level of self-confidence. You thought that English was very complicated language to learn and that because of your test paper results you came to the conclusion that you «probably have no talent in learning languages anyway». Now, you want to study medicine, law, architecture, computer engineering or any other subject at a university in an English speaking country. Chances are your parents are supporting you financially but they also want you to «do your homework» — part of which is your preparation for the TOEFL test. When you approach this task properly you will benefit in various ways. Here is an important piece of advice for you: No matter what your grades were in English at school — you have everything you need to excel in the language. You see, your school grades were not very objective to say the least. You might have been the best English student in your class and still, if you took the TOEFL test right now your score could be way below average. On the other hand, your English grades might always have been rather MEDIOCRE but with a concentrated systematic training you can do brilliantly at the TOEFL exam. Forget about the notion that you must have «a talent for languages» to attain a high command of the English language. Do you speak your mother tongue fluently? If your answer is yes then you already know the basic principles of learning a language. All you have to do now is PUT them into practice in a more goal-oriented way. What does that mean in regards to the TOEFL test? As you know the TOEFL assesses and evaluates your ability to use English in an academic context. Here is another of the fundamental facts you have to understand when you want to prepare successfully for the TOEFL test: There is no such thing as «TOEFL vocabulary». When you search the Internet or browse your local book store you will come across hundreds of websites and at least a dozen books claiming they would teach you «essential TOEFL words» or «TOEFL phrases» etc. Be careful when you encounter such products because they might trick you into thinking that is possible to learn the «TOEFL vocabulary» by heart. This is nonsense. As we've just established, «TOEFL vocabulary» doesn't exist. Do you remember the purpose of the TOEFL test? Exactly, the TOEFL assesses and evaluates your ability to use English in an academic context. The TOEFL doesn't assess and evaluate your ability to understand or memorize TOEFL vocabulary. Once you have grasped this basic concept it will be much easier for you to score high in the actual TOEFL test. If you agree I will remind you over and over again throughout our entire course that the idea of the TOEFL test is completely different from other tests such as the one you have to pass when you want to obtain your driver's licence. With a language exam there is an unlimited number of possible test questions so it doesn't make much sense to learn certain sentences by heart. Instead, we will analyse together which language items to focus on in our TOEFL preparation program and how to learn the appropriate vocabulary and information in the most effective way.

Let's take a look at what areas of the English language are covered in the TOEFL test. As you know the TOEFL is used as an entrance exam for people who want to study at a university in an English speaking country. So, when you enrol in an academic study course your English must be sufficient to follow the program, take notes and express the main ideas. As the TOEFL test is not intended for students of a particular subject or major we have to learn the basic vocabulary of a wide range of possible topics. The following is an overview of the sciences including a brief description. When you read through text you shouldn't translate any new words in a bi-lingual dictionary. Instead, you can focus on the words you already know and guess the meaning of any new vocabulary. If you find that are a too many new words for you to understand the general meaning of the text you should use an English-English dictionary to look up some of the main key words. When you are finished reading the definitions of the sciences we'll examine some techniques that help you absorb, comprehend and memorize new vocabulary. You can then apply those methods in your further TOEFL test preparation program.

Your first step toward acquiring a general academic English vocabulary is to define the term «Science». When you search reference books and dictionaries you will find various definitions for this word — the following is taken from the Cambridge Online Dictionaries:


Knowledge obtained from the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by observing, measuring and experimenting, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities:
Pure/applied science
Recent developments in science and technology
[Space travel is one of the marvels/wonders of modern science.]
A particular subject that is studied using scientific methods:
Physical sciences
Economics is not an exact science
Advances in medical science
The study of science:
a science graduate/teacher
a science course/lesson

According to Napoleon Hill, «science is the art of classifying facts into categories». Now, what are these categories the facts can be classified into? Here is a concise structure of some of the sciences you can study at a modern university:

Category 1:Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Category 2:Applied Arts and Sciences

Category 3:
Social Sciences and Philosophy

As you can see there are four main categories all the sciences can be divided into. Which of them is your favourite one? Maybe, we should take a closer look to see what particular sciences there are in the main categories? Here is a more detailed view: [based on Wikipedia]

Category 1 — Mathematical and Natural Sciences:

Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Computer science
Earth science
Ecology
Health science
Mathematics
Physics
Statistics

Category 2 — Applied Arts and Sciences:

Agriculture
Architecture
Business
Communication
Education
Engineering
Family and consumer science
Government
Law
Library and information science
Medicine
Politics
Public affairs
Software engineering
Technology
Transport

Category 3 — Social Sciences and Philosophy:

Anthropology
Archaeology
Economics
Geography
History
History of science and technology
Language
Linguistics
Mythology
Philosophy
Political science
Psychology
Sociology

So, what do you think now? How many of the topics above do you know? Is your favourite subject on the list? Ir you want to prepare for the TOEFL it is vital that you take a keen interest in the themes you are familiarizing yourself with. Also, getting ready for taking the TOEFL test you can kill at least two birds with one stone: You improve your command of the English language and on top of that you obtain valuable knowledge for your further study at university or college. That's why we'll have a third go on the sciences — this time you will read the definitions we mentioned earlier. Try to take in the vocabulary because this is good TOEFL practice. Maybe, you should read one definition at a time — no need to rush yourself through these texts. Follow the «How-do-you-eat-an-elephant» principle absorbing and digesting the information and vocabulary in many small instalments rather than trying to «swallow» the entire chunk at once. You can refer to the following descriptions of the sciences often, as a matter of fact you might even use this glossary as some kind of dictionary that you use whenever you read a newspaper article or any kind of academic text

Astronomy
Astronomy is a science involving the observation and explanation of events occurring outside Earth and its atmosphere. It studies the origins, evolution, physical and chemical properties of all the objects that can be observed in the sky (and are outside the earth), as well as all the processes involving them. What subfields it includes is a question whose answer has been changing with the ages. During part of the 20th century astronomy was considered to be separated in astrometry, celestial mechanics and astrophysics.

Biology
Biology is the science of life. It is concerned with the characteristics and behaviour patterns of organisms, how species and individuals come into existence, and what interactions they have with each other and with their environments. Overview of biology
Biology encompasses a broad spectrum of academic fields that are often viewed as independent disciplines. Together, they study life over a wide range of scales:
at the atomic and molecular scale, through molecular biology, biochemistry
at the cellular scale, through cell biology
at the multi-cellular scales, through physiology, anatomy, and histology
at the level of the development or ontogeny of an individual organism, through developmental biology
at the level of heredity between parent and offspring through genetics
at the level of group behavioUr through ethology
at the level of an entire population, through population genetics
on the multi-species scale of lineages, through systematics
at the level of interdependent populations and their habitats through ecology and evolutionary biology
and speculatively through Xenobiology at the level of life beyond the Earth.

Chemistry
Chemistry is the study of the atomic building blocks of nature, how they combine and their combinations which form the solids, liquids, and gases that make up most forms of matter.

The periodic table of the chemical elements is a display of known chemical elements, arranged by electron structure so that many chemical properties vary regularly across the table.

College students typically study chemistry in the following «blocks»:
analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, polymer chemistry and biochemistry. Often, discoveries in chemistry are made by physicists, biologists, chemical engineers or pharmacists.

Computer science
In its most general sense, computer science (CS) is the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. In practice, computer science includes a variety of topics relating to computers, which range from the abstract analysis of algorithms to more concrete subjects like programming languages, software, and computer hardware. As a scientific discipline, it is a very different activity from computer programming and computer engineering, although the three are often confused. «Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.» — Edsger Dijkstra «Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!» — Richard Feynman

Computer science has roots in electrical engineering, mathematics and linguistics. In the last third of the 20th century computer science has become recognized as a distinct discipline and has developed its own methods and terminology.

Earth science
Earth science (also known as geoscience or the geosciences), is an all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. It is arguably a special case in planetary science, being the only known life-bearing planet. There are both reductionist and holistic approaches to Earth science. The major historic discliplines use physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology to build a quantitative understanding of the principal areas or spheres of the Earth system:

Geology covers the rocky parts of the Earth (or lithosphere) including the planet's core, mantle and crust. Major subdisciplines are geophysics, geochemistry, paleontology, mineralogy, and sedimentology.

Oceanography and Limnology describe respectively the marine and freshwater domains of the watery parts of the Earth (or hydrosphere). Major subdisciplines are physical, chemical, and biological oceanography.

Atmospheric sciences cover the gaseous parts of the Earth (or atmosphere).

Glaciology covers the icy parts of the Earth (or cryosphere).

Ecology
Ecology is the branch of science that studies habitats and the interactions between living things and the environment. The term was coined in 1866 by the Darwinist and German biologist Ernst Haeckel from the Greek oikos meaning «house» and logos meaning «science»). The environment includes both the abiotic environment — non-living things like climate and geology — and the biotic environment — living things like plants and animals. Much of ecological research is concerned with the distribution and abundance of organisms and how these are influenced by characteristics and properties of the environment: organisms influence their environment and the environment influences organisms.

The term ecology means different things depending on who is using it. For many scientists, ecology belongs to the basic biological sciences. However, most ecologists argue that ecology is a scientific field of its own. For most non-scientists, ecology is first and foremost the protection of nature and the environment from humans and our activities; some argue that this position confuses ecology with environmentalism. Others view ecology as more than a science — to them it is a certain vision of the world, which would consist in people living in harmony with the other living beings, and in not seeing the other organisms which surround us as mere objects to be used, but rather as belonging to a larger coherent system.

Health science
Health science is a medical discipline of applied science which deals with human or animal health. There are two parts to health science: the study, research, and knowledge of health and the application of that knowledge to improve health, cure infectious diseases, and to understand how humans and animals function. Health science research builds on the pure sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics and also social sciences (for example medical sociology).
There are a wide range of traditional areas of health science. The most common areas are: medicine, nursing, midwifery, and various forms of therapy to supplement the healing process and restore proper activity (e.g. recreational, physical occupational, speech, and respiratory). Health science includes both the study and application of preventing and curing human diseases and disorders. Medical doctors include physicians and surgeons. There are many different branches of medicine; the other health care professions also have specialties or focus on specific populations or settings of care. Other less common medical areas include first aid and triage.

Dental health has grown in importance in recent decades making dentistry a major field of health sciences. Counselling, hospice care, home care, nutrition, medical social work, alternative medicine, pharmacology, and toxicology are all considered part of health science. Veterinary science is the health science dedicated exclusively to the care of animals.

Mathematics
Mathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of «figures and numbers». In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures using logic and mathematical notation; other views are described in Philosophy of mathematics.
The specific structures that are investigated by mathematicians often have their origin in the natural sciences, most commonly in physics, but mathematicians also define and investigate structures for reasons purely internal to mathematics, because the structures may provide, for instance, a unifying generalization for several subfields, or a helpful tool for common calculations. Finally, many mathematicians study the areas they do for purely aesthetic reasons, viewing mathematics as an art form rather than as a practical or applied science.

Mathematics is often abbreviated to math in North America and maths in other English-speaking countries.

Physics
Physics is the science of Nature in the broadest sense. Physicists study the behaviour and interactions of matter and radiation. Theories of physics are generally expressed as mathematical relations. Well-established theories are often referred to as physical laws or laws of physics; however, like all scientific theories, they are ultimately provisional.
Physics is very closely related to the other natural sciences, particularly chemistry, the science of molecules and the chemical compounds that they form in bulk. Chemistry draws on many fields of physics, particularly quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism. However, chemical phenomena are sufficiently varied and complex that chemistry is usually regarded as a separate discipline.

Statistics
Statistics is the science and practice of developing human knowledge through the use of empirical data. It is based soundly on statistical theory which is a branch of applied mathematics. Within statistical theory, randomness and uncertainty are modelled by probability theory. Statistical practice includes the planning, summarizing, and interpreting of uncertain observations. Because the aim of statistics is to produce the «best» information from available data, some authors make statistics a branch of decision theory.

The word «statistics» comes from the modern Latin phrase statisticum collegium (lecture about state affairs), from which came the Italian word statista, which means «statesman» or «politician» (compare to status) and the German Statistik, originally designating the analysis of data about the state. It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early nineteenth century.

We describe our knowledge (and ignorance) mathematically and attempt to learn more from whatever we can observe. This requires us to
plan our observations to control their variability (experiment design),
summarize a collection of observations to feature their commonality by suppressing details (descriptive statistics), and
reach consensus about what the observations tell us about the world we observe (statistical inference).

[based on Wikipedia]

OK, how do you like the course so far? I'm sure reading the descriptions above you have been able to pick up some interesting and new vocabulary as well as to learn useful facts about the sciences. Before we proceed with our academic journey we should take a look at our language learning techniques. You know that you have to internalize a certain amount of English words when you aim to score high on the TOEFL test and get admission to a university study program.
Now, what is the best way to learn new vocabulary? To answer this question we have to analyse the structure of language. In most traditional English classes, as well as in course books and on «ESL» (English as Second Language) websites you will find that the English language is divided into several parts — with Grammar and Vocabulary being the two most frequently used sections. Do you remember your English lessons at school? You probably will recall that there were two major elements — Grammar and Vocabulary. Grammar meant a lot of complicated terms and rules — tenses, participles, modals, conditionals, active and passive voice, the gerund, relative clauses, compound sentences, split infinitives and so on.

As far as vocabulary is concerned — well, this part basically involved translating words from your mother tongue into English hoping that they would somehow «stick» in your mind. Unfortunately, you weren't able to acquire a substantial active vocabulary of the English language and you often became frustrated thinking that your mind was simply incapable of absorbing and storing all those words and eventually you gave up. Now a couple of years later you are facing the same situation again — you must learn a lot of new vocabulary in order to achieve a high TOEFL score and that's why it is crucial for you to understand the following: As we have already established it used to be very difficult for you to learn and memorize new English vocabulary let alone understand and use all those complicated grammar rules and their many exceptions. Have you ever wondered why it was so hard for you to learn English? It's a fact that the vast majority of the traditional teaching methods are rather ineffective and lead you to actually think that learning English fast and easily is almost impossible. Yet, learning English can be as much fun as playing your favourite sport. What you need is a slightly different approach to the conventional classroom method. View English as the means to achieve a goal rather than the goal itself. This means you should embrace the English language as a whole instead of dissecting it into grammar and vocabulary. When you speak in your mother tongue you use a set of word combinations, phrases, expressions and entire sentences that you have acquired through constant re-production and repetition. You can apply the same technique when you learn English: Always try to memorize words in a context. The English language consists of so-called «lexical items», that is, when you want to learn English for practical application you should be aware that every single new word you encounter usually occurs in combination with other words forming a lexical unit. There are different categories of those constructions — some are called «collocations», another category could be called «idiomatic expressions». You don't have to know all the details about this classification because too much of this information would only confuse you and slow down your learning process. Just remember this: Always try to memorize new words in context, that means in combination with other words. If you come across a sentence with an unknown word, don't just look up the meaning of that word in your dictionary. Instead, write down the entire sentence and try to guess what the new word might mean. In most cases your knowledge about the subject of the text you are reading will be sufficient to accomplish that task. Keep in mind that when you enrol in an academic course at an English language university you must acquire reading skills enabling you to understand authentic texts without translating into your mother tongue.

OK, maybe we should practise the lexical approach a little? Here are the definitions of the second categories of sciences. When you read them now you should try to guess the meaning of new words before you look them up in the dictionary.

Agriculture
Agriculture includes both subsistence agriculture, which is producing enough food to meet the needs of the farmer and family, but no more) and also (almost universally in the «developed» nations and increasingly so in other areas) the production of financial income from cultivation of the land or commercial raising of animals (animal husbandry). Agriculture is the practice — the study of these disciplines is called agricultural science.

Architecture
Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings. A wider definition would include within its scope the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of town planning, urban design, and landscape to the micro level of furniture and product design. Architecture, equally importantly, also refers to the product of such a design.

Business
Historically, the term business referred to activities or interests. By extension the word became (as recently as the 18th century) synonymous with «an individual commercial enterprise». It has also taken on the more general meaning of «a nexus of commercial activities».
Businesses are established to perform economic activities. With rare exceptions (such as co-operatives, corporate bodies, non-profit societies and institutions of government), they are for-profit ventures. That is, one of the main objectives of the owners and operators of the business is to receive a financial return for their time and effort.

There are many ways to classify types of businesses. Service businesses offer intangible products and typically have different, usually smaller, capital requirements than manufacturers. Distributors will have different inventory control needs than a retailer or manufacturer.

Communication
Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually via common system of symbols. It takes a wide variety of forms, from two people having a face-to-face conversation, to hand signals, to messages sent over global telecommunication networks. The process of communication is what allows us to interact with other people; without it, we would be unable to share knowledge or experiences with anything outside of ourselves. Common forms of communication include speaking, writing, gestures, and broadcasting.

Education
Education encompasses the teaching of specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, good judgement and wisdom. One of the fundamental goals of education is to impart culture across the generations socialization.

Medicine
Medicine is an area of human knowledge concerned with restoring health. It is, in the broadest sense of the term, the science and practice of the prevention and curing of human diseases, and other ailments of the human body or mind. However, it is often used only to refer to those matters dealt with by academically trained physicians and surgeons. There are many traditional and modern methods and schools of healing which are usually not considered to be part of medicine in a strict sense (see health science for an overview). Medicine has two aspects: both as an area of knowledge (a science), and as an application of that knowledge (the medical professions). Evidence-based medicine is an attempt to link these two aspects through the use of the scientific method and techniques derived from safety engineering.

Software engineering
Software engineering is the technologies and practices used to create and maintain computer software, while emphasizing productivity and quality. These technologies and practices encompass languages, databases, tools, platforms, libraries, standards, patterns, and processes.
Software engineering applications include email, embedded software, graphical user interfaces, office suites, operating systems, optimizing compilers, relational databases, robotics controllers, video games, and the world wide web. Other important applications include accounting, airline reservations, avionics, banking, and telephony. These applications embody social and economic value, in that they make people more productive, improve their quality of life, and enable them to do things that would otherwise be impossible.

Technology
Technology is the development and application of tools, machines, materials and processes that help to solve human problems. As a human activity, technology predates both science and engineering.
The term technology often characterises inventions and gadgets using recently-discovered scientific principles and processes. However, even very old inventions such as the wheel exemplify technology.

Transport
Transport, or transportation (as it is called in the United States), is the movement of people and goods from one place to another. The term is derived from the Latin trans, meaning across, and portare, meaning to carry.
The field of transport has several aspects: loosely they can be divided into a triad of infrastructure, vehicles, and operations. Infrastructure includes the transport networks (roads, railways, airways, canals, pipelines, etc.) that are used, as well as the nodes or terminals (such as airports, railway stationss, bus stations and seaports). The vehicles generally ride on the networks, such as automobiles, trains, airplanes. The operations deal with the control of the system, such as traffic signals and ramp meters, railroad switches, air traffic control, etc, as well as policies, such as how to finance the system (e.g. use of tolls or gasoline taxes in the case of highway transport).

As you can see the second category of the sciences covers technical areas whereas in the next category you will be introduced to sciences that primarily deal with human beings, our behaviour, our thoughts and our relationship to the world at large.

Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humankind (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all dimensions of humanity. Central to anthropology is the concept of culture, and the notion that human nature is culture; that our species has evolved a universal capacity to conceive of the world symbolically, to teach and learn such symbols socially, and to transform the world (and ourselves) based on such symbols.
In the United States, anthropology is traditionally divided into four fields: physical anthropology, which studies primate behavioUr, human evolution, and population genetics; linguistics, which studies variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture; archaeology, which studies the material remains of human societies; and cultural anthropology, (also called social anthropology or sociocultural anthropology), which studies social behavior and beliefs (among phenomena studied by cultural anthropologists are kinship patterns, social networks, politics, patterns in production, exchange, and consumption, and religion). Around the 1990s, some U.S. Anthropology programs began dividing into two, one emphasizing the humanities and critical theory, the other emphasizing the natural sciences and positivism. In Great Britain, archeology is often treated as separate from anthropology.

Archaeology
Archaeology (or archeology) is the study of human cultures through the analysis of material remains (such as architecture, artefacts, biofacts, the human body, landscapes).

Economics
Economics is a social science which studies human activity in relation to meeting wants and desires through the lens of price relationships. Originally called «political economy», the word «economy» coming from the Greek «oiko-» for house and «nomos» for laws or norms, the derivation provided by Rousseau in 1755.
The term «economics» was coined around 1870 and was popularized by Alfred Marshall, and can be said to diverge from political economy in that it focuses more specifically on price relationships. For a fuller discussion of the differences, see political economy and value. Note that the word «economist» predated «economics».

Modern market economics was concisely defined by Lionell Robbins in 1935: «Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.»

That is, the study of the trade offs involved between alternate sets of decisions. The central questions of economic theory are then what resources are scarce, and how does one make choices between the alternatives. The subject is said to be positive when it attempts to explain the consequences of different choices given a set of assumptions and normative when it prescribes a certain route of action.

Mainstream market economics focuses on the measurement of price, which are measurable quantities of the medium of exchange, generally money, which are involved in a transaction. Theories of value exist to explain the underlying quantities, if any, that price is said to measure. Divergences between price and actual outcomes occupy a large fraction of economic theory.

Aspects receiving particular attention in economics are resource allocation, trade, monetary policy and competition.

Geography
Geography is the study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. The word derives from the Greek words he ge («the Earth») and graphein («to write», as in «to describe»). Geography is also the title of various historical books on this subject, notably the Geographia by Klaudios Ptolemaios (2nd century).

Geography is much more than cartography, the study of maps. It not only investigates what is where on the Earth, but also why it's there and not somewhere else, sometimes referred to as «location in space». It studies this whether the cause is natural or human. It also studies the consequences of those differences.

History
History is often used as a generic term for information about the past, such as in «geologic history of the Earth». When used as a field of study, history refers to human history, which is the recorded past of human societies.
The term «history» comes from the Greek historia, «an account of one's inquiries,» and shares that etymology with the English word story.

Historians use many types of sources, including written or printed records, interviews (oral history), and archaeology. Different approaches may be more common in some periods than others, and the study of history has its fads and fashions (see historiography, the history of history). The events that occurred prior to human records are known as prehistory.

Language
People have attempted to define language in a number of ways. Example definitions include the following:
a system for representing things, actions, ideas and states
a tool people use to communicate their concepts of reality into the minds of others
a system of meanings shared among people
a code that members of a linguistic community use to mediate between form and meaning
a set of grammatically correct utterances (i.e. words, sentences, etc.)
a set of utterances that could be understood by a linguistic community thought

Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, made a distinction between langue and parole. In any case, human language is the most central meaning of language. The study of language is called linguistics.

Making a principled distinction between one human language and another is often not possible. One major issue is the dialect continuum phenomena, where the boundaries between named language groups are necessarily arbitrary. For instance, there are dialects of German very similar to Dutch which are not mutually intelligible with other dialects of (what we call) German.

Linguistics
Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as Russ Rymer flamboyantly puts it:

«Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.»

Mythology
A mythology is a relatively cohesive set of myths: stories that comprise a certain religion or belief system.

Philosophy
Philosophy is the critical study of the most fundamental questions that humankind has been able to ask. Philosophers ask questions like:

Ontology
What is the nature of things that exist outside of us? Are there things in a natural world independent of our perception? Do our perceptions of reality match the actual reality that is «out there»? If so, how do we know?
Metaphysics: What does it mean to think, to have a mind? How can we know that other minds (i.e. other thinking beings) actually exist?

Ethics
Is there a difference between right and wrong, and if so, how can we prove this? How do we apply theoretical ideas of right and wrong in practical situations? Theology: What do we mean by the word «God»? Does God exist? Epistemology: Is knowledge possible, and if so, what is knowledge?

Philosophy
Philosophy is paradigmatically concerned with fundamental concepts such as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty; philosophers have often been particularly concerned with asking critical questions about the natures of these concepts-questions which don't seem to be amenable to treatment by the special sciences.

Political science
Political science is the study of politics. It involves the study of structure and process in government — or any equivalent system that attempts to assure safety, fairness, and closure across a broad range of risks and access to a broad range of commons for its human charges. Accordingly, political scientists often study trade unions, corporations, churches or other forms of collective intelligence that are not «political» in the sense of influencing law or executive decisions — but have structure and process approaching that of government in complexity and interconnection.

Psychology
Psychology is a collection of academic, clinical and industrial disciplines concerned with the explanation and prediction of behavioUr, thought-processes, emotions, motivations, relationships, potentials and pathologies. It might be said that many related disciplines live under the same name including: experimental psychology, which focuses on basic and applied science; humanistic psychology, which uses qualitative research rather than conventional statistical methods to investigate the subjective experience of human beings; clinical psychology and counselling psychology, which focus primarily on helping people overcome or better manage pathologies as well as transcend perceived limitations; and Industrial/Organizational Psychology, which applies psychological principles to people working in organizations.

Sociology
Sociology studies the social rules and processes that bind, and separate, people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions.

Anthony Giddens — in his textbook «Sociology» — defines sociology as the study of the societal lives of humans, groups and societies. Sociology is interested in our behavioUr as social beings; thus the sociological field of interest ranges from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes.

So, do you think you have made some progress in your preparation for the TOEFL test? You know the old saying: Rome wasn't built in a day. The definitions of the sciences are just one first step on your road to success, you will have to develop the habit of reading authentic English texts on a regular basis.

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thanks zeta girl

thank you

you're welcome