Conserve | Vocabulary
About this video
David teaches the verb 'conserve', meaning to keep something safe or protect a natural resource, and its noun form 'conservation'. It combines con (with, together) and serv (to guard or watch). He links it to preserve, conservatory and observatory, and shows conserving water and the conservation of sand dunes.
You'll be able to
- explain what 'conserve' and 'conservation' mean and use them in sentences.
- break conserve into con (together) and serv (guard, watch).
- explain related words like preserve, conservatory and observatory.
Key words
- conserve
- To keep something safe or protect a natural resource, often by using less of it.
- conservation
- Protecting a natural place or resource and keeping it safe and unchanged.
- con-
- A prefix meaning with or together.
- serv
- A Latin root meaning to guard or watch.
- preserve
- To protect something before it can be harmed, like making fruit into jam.
- conservatory
- A greenhouse where plants are protected from the weather.
Transcript
- [David] Keep it together, wordsmiths. That's right. The word in this video is conserve. Conserve. It's a verb, and it means to keep something safe, to protect a natural resource. You might also see it in its noun form, conservation, as in animal conservation.
Let's break this word down into its two parts. Con means with or together like confident or congratulate, and serve comes from the Latin Serv, which means to guard or watch. So based on these word parts, conserve literally means to guard or watch together. Let's come up with some similar words that have these elements con and serve.
I'll put on some music and give you 10 seconds. Ready? Here we go. Meet you back in 10. (upbeat music) Here's what I came up with, preserve. Another way to protect, to stop something before it happens. Pre meaning before, so I'm protecting it before something happens.
If I preserve fruit, I've made it into jam before it can rot. Conservatory, which is like conserve plus atory meaning a place for. A conservatory is a greenhouse where plants are protected from outdoor weather. And observatory, ob means towards or in front of, and an observatory is a looking place.
A building with a big telescope that you can use to watch the stars and the planets. It is pointed towards the heavens. Let's point away from the heavens and towards some example sentences that use the word conserve. To conserve water during the drought, we don't take baths, just showers.
So I'm saving water, right? There's a big communal reservoir somewhere in my town, and I'm using less of it by taking a shower instead of a bath, and that means that there's water left over to say put out fires. But there's also that other use I talked about, conservation, which has a political meaning.
Usually, it's about a group of people who come together for environmental reasons to protect a natural place. Thus, Emilio joined up with the conservation effort to protect the sand dunes. The conservationists are working to protect the dunes, to keep them safe from threats or development or pollution.
Conservation is all about protecting a place and keeping it safe and unchanged. May you always conserve the spirit of learning within yourselves, wordsmiths, because I believe that with it you can learn anything. David out.
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