Read the excerpt from the hot zone. she took up a scalpel and slit the monkey's abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. the spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a globe of smoked salami. she did not see any bloody lesions inside this monkey. she had expected that the monkey's interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. which strategy would be most in determining the meaning of the word “scalpel”? replacing “scalpel” with the nearby synonym “blade” substituting the word “object” for the word “scalpel” using context clues “away from her gloved fingers” becoming familiar with prefixes, roots, and suffixes

A) replacing “scalpel” with the nearby synonym “blade”

The correct answer is A. Replacing "scalpel" with the nearby synonym "blade"

Explanation:

It is common in almost any type of texts to find unknown words or words you are not familiarized with and in most cases, you will need to infer or determine the meaning of these words to understand the main ideas in a text. This can be done by inferring the meaning from the context which means understanding the words that surround the unknown word and determining the meaning according to this context; using the meaning of the words that compose the words such as prefixes and suffixes to infer the meaning of the whole word or replacing the word with a synonym given in the text.

The type of process used to determine the meaning of the word depends on the knowledge of the reader, the type of word and whether the text provides a synonym of it. In the case of the word "scalpel" from the text the best alternative is to replace it with the synonym provided in the following sentence as "making, a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers" explain what a scalpel and its use through details and by providing the word "blade" to replace the word "scalpel" which shows both words mean the same and therefore the reader can just use the second word to understand the meaning of the first one and avoid any other inferring process, also, the meaning of the word "scalpel" is difficult to infer through the context or prefixes /suffixes as this is a short and technical word. Thus, the best way to determining the meaning of the word "scalpel" is by replacing "scalpel" with the nearby synonym "blade".