A course in basic scientific English

by J R. Ewer

PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE COURSE The purpose of this course, as its title indicates, is to teach students of scientific subjects (including medicine, engineering and agriculture) the basic language of scientific English. This basic language is made up of sentence patterns, structural (functional) words and non-structural vocabulary which are common to all scientific disciplines and form the essential framework upon which the special vocabulary of each discipline is superimposed. Once this basic language has been mastered— together with the principal word-building devices (prefixes and suffixes) also presented in this book—the acquisition of these special vocabularies presents very little difficulty, since they are mainly international words and therefore very similar to those already used in the student's own language. The material incorporated in the course has been selected, for the most part on a frequency basis, from the scrutiny of more than three million words of modern scientific