Conserve | Vocabulary | Khan Academy
Keep it together, wordsmiths! That's right, the word in this video is conserve.
Conserve is a verb, and it means to keep something safe, to protect a natural resource. You might also see it in its noun form, conservation, as in animal conservation. Let's break this word down into its two parts. Con means with or together, like confident or congratulate, and serve comes from the Latin serere, which means to guard or watch.
So, based on these word parts, conserve literally means to guard or watch together. Let's come up with some similar words that have these elements, con and serve. I'll put on some music and give you 10 seconds. Ready? Here we go! Meet you back in [Music].
- Here's what I came up with: preserve, another way to protect, to stop something before it happens. Pre means before, right? So, I'm protecting it before something happens. If I preserve fruit, I've made it into jam before it can rot, right?
Conservatory, which is like conserve plus -atory, meaning a place for a conservatory, is a greenhouse where plants are protected from outdoor weather. And observatory; ob means towards or in front of, and an observatory is a looking place, a building with a big telescope that you can use to watch the stars and the planets. It is pointed towards the heavens.
Let's point away from the heavens and towards some example sentences that use the word conserve.
To conserve water during the drought, we don't take baths, just showers, so I'm saving water, right? There's a big communal reservoir somewhere in my town, and I'm using less of it by taking a shower instead of a bath. That means that there's water left over to, say, put out fires.
But there's also that other use I talked about, conservation, which has a political meaning. Usually, it's about a group of people who come together for environmental reasons to protect a natural place. Thus, Emelo joined up with the conservation effort to protect the sand dunes. The conservationists are working to protect the dunes, to keep them safe from threats or development or pollution.
Conservation is all about protecting a place and keeping it safe and unchanged. You always conserve the spirit of learning within yourselves, wordsmiths, because I believe that with it, you can learn anything.
Daveid out.