When I was in my early teens, I was taken to a spectacular show on ice by the mother of a

friend. Looked round at the luxury of the【M1】______ rink, my friends mother remarked on the "plush" seats we had been given. I did not know what she meant, and being proud of my【M2】______ vocabulary, I tried to infer its meaning from the context. " Plush" was clearly intended as a complimentary, a positive evaluation: that much I【M3】______ could tell it from the tone of voice and the context. So I started to use【M4】______ the word. Yes, I replied, they certainly are plush, and so are the ice rink and the costumes of the skaters, arent they？ My friends mother was very polite to correct me, but I could tell from her expression that【M5】______ I had not got the word quite right. Often we can indeed infer from the context what a word roughly means, and that is in fact the way which we usually acquire both new【M6】______ words and new meanings for familiar words, specially in our own first【M7】______ language. But sometimes we need to ask, as I should have asked for【M8】______ plush, and this is particularly true in the aspect of a foreign language.【M9】______ If you are continually surrounded by speakers of the language you are learning, you can ask them directly, but often this opportunity does not exist for the learner of English. So dictionaries have been developed to【M10】______ mend the gap.

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