readers hey good to see you glad you're here I am having a doozy of a time I'm be flustered I'm Bamboozled I'm struggling to understand a word in this paragraph I just read and I wonder if you can help me do it with the power of context clues take a look at the paragraph with me the Mountain Rose up before him impossibly high Dylan tugged on his climbing harness to make sure it was Secure and then clipped a safety line to the harness with a C araber and that's the word I don't know it would be dangerous to slip let's climb this thing buds he said all right so I know I harness is like safety gear a bunch of heavy duty straps that keep someone in place or keep them from falling a thing a mountain climber would wear here's the mountain climber Dylan here's the Rope but what is a carabiner what is the thing that's supposed to be in this person's hands to connect them and their harness to this safety line as they climb up the mountain that's where I'm stuck I don't know any root words that help me understand it so I can't break it down it's just fully a word I do not know but that is okay because I can use the power of context clues to understand it and what is context context is the stuff that surrounds something in this case it's the words around the word I don't know the words next door the neighboring language we can figure out what Carabiner means by analyzing the other words and ideas that surround it so what are the clues in the paragraph we can use to make sense of what Carabiner means I'll put on some music pause the video if you want to and meet me back here when you're ready here we go all right here are some Clues I identified let's see if yours were similar so carabiners have to do with climbing we know this because Dylan is about to climb up a mountain and he's wearing a safety harness we know that carabiners link things together and we know this because he Clips a line rope to his safety harness connecting them right he does that with the Carabiner and we also know that they keep you safe somehow carabiners do we know this because the paragraph says it would be dangerous to slip so the harness and the Carabiner and the safety line Must ALL prevent dangerous slip somehow so whatever this thing is it's probably some piece of gear that you use to clip things together to prevent you from falling when you're climbing something so let me try to write out my own best guess definition a carabiner is an object that you use to connect a climbing harness to a rope so you don't slip and now let's look up a picture of a carabiner and see how I did yo look at that metal clip attaching to a rope the point using context clues to understand words isn't to guess your way past unfamiliar words forever it's to create a basis of understanding so you can get through the sentence and understand the meaning of what you're reading you can always look up the word later if you're curious it's not cheating to use a dictionary and you should be curious what if you needed to climb a mountain hey whatever you need to do I believe in you because you can learn anything David out and