Using context clues to determine the meaning of a word

0:00- [David] Readers, hey, good to see you. Glad you're here. I am having a doozy of a time. I'm flustered, I'm bamboozled. I'm struggling to understand a word in this paragraph I just read, and I wonder if you can help me do it with the power of context clues. Take a look at the paragraph with me.

0:18The mountain rose up before him, impossibly high. Dylan tugged on his climbing harness to make sure it was secure and then clipped a safety line to the harness with a carabiner. And that's the word I don't know. It would be dangerous to slip. "Let's climb this thing, buds!" he said.

0:37All right, so I know a harness is like safety gear. A bunch of heavy duty straps that keep someone in place or keep them from falling, a thing a mountain climber would wear. Here's the mountain climber, Dylan. Here's the rope. But what is a carabiner? What is the thing that's supposed to be in this person's hand to connect them and their harness to this safety line as they climb up the mountain?

0:59That's where I'm stuck. I don't know any root words that help me understand it, so I can't break it down. It's just fully a word I do not know, but that is okay, because I can use the power of context clues to understand it. And what is context? Context is the stuff that surrounds something.

1:17In this case, it's the words around the word I don't know, the words next door, the neighboring language. We can figure out what carabiner means by analyzing the other words and ideas that surround it. So what are the clues in the paragraph we can use to make sense of what carabiner means?

1:35I'll put on some music. Pause the video if you want to, and meet me back here when you're ready. Here we go. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) All right, here are some clues I identified. Let's see if yours were similar. So carabiners have to do with climbing.

2:00We know this because Dylan is about to climb up a mountain and he's wearing a safety harness. We know that carabiners link things together and we know this because he clips a line rope to his safety harness connecting them, right? He does that with the carabiner.

2:17And we also know that they keep you safe somehow, carabiners do. We know this because the paragraph says, it would be dangerous to slip. So the harness and the carabiner and the safety line must all prevent dangerous slipping somehow. So whatever this thing is, it's probably some piece of gear that you use to clip things together to prevent you from falling when you're climbing something.

2:42So let me try to write out my own best guess definition. A carabiner is an object that you use to connect a climbing harness to a rope so you don't slip. And now let's look up a picture of a carabiner and see how I did. Yo, look at that metal clip attaching to a rope.

3:00The point of using context clues to understand words isn't to guess your way past unfamiliar words forever. It's to create a basis of understanding so you can get through the sentence and understand the meaning of what you're reading. You can always look up the word later if you're curious.

3:16It's not cheating to use a dictionary. And you should be curious. What if you needed to climb a mountain? Hey, whatever you need to do, I believe in you, because you can learn anything. David out.