Now here's a short exercise to help you practice what you have learned. In the paragraph below, several adjectives are shown in red. Find each word in your thesaurus, and look at the list of synonyms. One of them should appear in the box below the text. Choose it to replace the simple adjective as you rewrite the text on a piece of paper. When you have finished, scroll down the page to check your work.

     Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Ulm, Germany, into a middle-class family. His parents owned an electrical machinery shop. As a child he was a little slow to develop, and did not talk until the age of three, but he was very curious about nature and natural processes, and was able to understand very complex mathematical theories. He was also an imaginative child, and became very impatient with the dull discipline of school. He went to study at the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich, but proved to be a rather lazy student, frequently missing classes. However, he was able to pass his exams by using the notes of a classmate.

     In 1905, Einstein received his doctorate, and in the same year, he began publishing his work in physics. He became famous for his theories of Special Relativity (1905) and General Relativity (1916). Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. His pacifist views led him to leave Germany for the USA in the 1930s, where he spent the remainder of his life.

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