3.4 Background Knowledge

My first impression was that it would be difficult to determine the meaning of proliferate because it is used in context only once and the sentence itself is not very long. Also it uses a similie to make a comparison which seems to complicate manners. However, I was able to think of one plausible way in which a student in the 8th or 10th grade might come across this word and have some chance at guessing its meaning based upon the context of the word in the sentence and an appropriate background knowledge

Assumptions

Assume it is a 10th or 8th grade student and he has an average background in biology (he sat through the courses and inevitably some of the information was able to stick.) In his mind he has representations of both rabbits and stem cells. The following might be the representations:

Rabbits

- furry

- eat shrubs

- hop fast

- the Trix bunny and Easter bunny are imaginary bunnies

- Rabbits have amazing reproduction rates. (A common example of the reproduction rates of rabbits are the jackrabbits of Australia. In 1859 three pairs of jackrabbits were released for sport (the continenet previously had no rabbits). Within a decade their popluation was in the hundreds of thousands and Australia's ecosystem was forever altered. This is a common example in population ecology. )

Stem Cells

- Spring of life

- Useful in research

- All other cells come from stem cells

- Stem cells have amazing reproductive rates and from a single cell comes enumerably many. (This concept would have become known to the student through his study in basic cell biology and being exposed to the process of mitosis)

Everything is plausible to this point. Lets assume that the student has just finished the chapter on cell biology and the teacher has given an additional reading assignment on the wonders of stem cells (the article actually refers to the usefulness of stem cells in scientific research and their many applications.) The student is merrily reading until he comes to the word "proliferate" which he is unfamiliar with.

It is now time for the student to do a search. He knows from the context that the verb is an action that is common to both rabbits and stem cells. Essentially:

"Rabbits do some action like stem cells do some action"

The student can review the actions of both rabbits and stem cells(his background knowledge) and make deductions as follows:

"I know rabbits hop fast. Do stem cells hop fast? No."

"I know rabbits eat shrubs. Do stem cells eat shrubs? No."

"I know rabbits reproduce like mad. Do stem cells reproduce like mad? I guess cell division happens pretty quickly and you certainly get a lot of cells from a single one. So yes, they both reproduce like mad. This could be what proliferate means."

Of course this whole scenario is reverse engineered. I started knowing the definition of the unknown word and was able to figure out a way in which a person without that knowledge could piece it together. Whether it would work in reality is different matter.