Context Clues in a Supermarket Campaign Article
The student is reading a short article about a supermarket campaign for a vocabulary question. The article says: 'The campaign was well-meant, but it proved counterproductive. Shoppers, unsure whether the new labels meant "best before" or "use by", simply discarded more food than before. The volume of waste rose by 12 percent, and retailers quietly withdrew the labels after three months.' Three words are underlined: counterproductive, volume, and quietly. The question asks the student to work out each meaning from the surrounding text, not from a dictionary, and to say which clue in the sentence made the difference. Her teacher has allowed no dictionary and five minutes. The student's first instinct is to translate counterproductive as 'not effective' and quietly as 'making little noise'.
1. Work out the meaning of counterproductive from the extract, and name the two clues you used.
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Counterproductive means 'producing the opposite of the intended result'. Two clues support this.
The first is the contrast signalled by 'but' after 'well-meant': the campaign's intention was good, so the 'but' promises a bad outcome, and the outcome is more food thrown away - the reverse of what a waste-reduction campaign wanted. The second is morphological: counter- carries the sense 'against, opposite' (as in counterattack, counteract), and productive supplies 'producing'.
The student's first instinct, 'not effective', is close but too weak. 'Not effective' would mean the campaign changed nothing, whereas the extract says waste rose by 12 percent, so the campaign made things worse. In a vocabulary question, prefer the option that captures the direction of the effect, not merely its absence.
2. 'Volume' has several dictionary senses. Which one fits here, and which clues rule out the others?
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The sense is 'amount or quantity', specifically the amount of waste. The clue is 'rose by 12 percent': percentages measure quantity, and the noun is 'waste', a mass of material that can be measured. The verb 'rose' reinforces this, since amounts rise.
The other common senses are ruled out by context. 'Volume' as loudness requires a sound source, and nothing here is making noise. 'Volume' as a book requires a publication, and the article is about labels and food. A useful procedure is to substitute each sense into the sentence and see which produces a coherent claim; only the quantity sense does. Another point worth noting is that the sense of a polysemous word is fixed by its collocates - 'volume of waste' and 'rose by 12 percent' together leave little room for doubt.
3. Is 'quietly' in 'retailers quietly withdrew the labels' literal or figurative? Explain, using a clue from the sentence.
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It is figurative: 'quietly' here means 'without public announcement or attention', not 'with little noise'. Retailers are organisations, not people speaking, and the action is withdrawing labels, which makes no sound.
The clue is the contrast with the campaign itself, which was public enough to reach shoppers and to be reported in the article. A withdrawal done 'quietly' is one the retailers did not publicise, presumably because the campaign had failed. The adverb also carries a faint evaluation: it hints that the retailers preferred the failure to go unnoticed.
Literal readings of manner adverbs in business or political reporting are a common trap. Check whether the subject can physically perform the manner described; if it cannot, the adverb is almost certainly evaluative rather than descriptive.