When you come across a new word or expression while reading, you can often figure out its meaning by using the context - the other words in the sentence and the other sentences in the paragraph, or your own knowledge about the world. There are, at least, five major types of context clues:

1. Definition and restatement
　　Example: Modern medicine and new methods of food production allow adults to live longer and babies to survive, not die soon after birth.
　　(Here "not die" helps us to know what survive means.)
　　The definition or restatement of a new word may be in parentheses ( ), after a dash (-), after a comma(,), or after a phrase like that is or i.e.

2. Words with opposite meaning
　　Example: Most of us see everything as independent from one another. But the reality is that everything is part of one interconnected, interrelated whole.
　　(With the help of "But", we can guess that interconnected and interrelated have the opposite meaning of independent.)

3. Examples
　　Example: The simplest way to help the environment is not to impact on it. Tread as lightly as you can, taking as little as possible, and putting back as much as you can.
　　(Impact can be understood through the examples of treading lightly, taking little and putting back much.)

4. Common Sense
　　Example: Trees bring water up from the ground, allowing water to evaporate into the atmosphere.
　　(From our common sense we can get the meaning of evaporate as "to change from a liquid state to a gas.")