ShmoopTube

00:03

And here's your shmoopy word du jour:

00:06

Despite the cold, the stalwart search and rescue team continued to look for the missing hiker.

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Even the mountain lion they interviewed claimed not to have seen her.

00:20

What is the meaning of the word stalwart? And here are the potential answers:

00:28

OK, so what is this question testing?

00:31

Other than our ability to tell when a mountain lion is... lyin'?

00:35

It's asking if we know what STALWART means. Well, if we weren't familiar with the word,

00:40

we could take a great hint from the first part of the question:

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DESPITE the cold -- or... think of it like "to spite the cold" -- and we're sure you know spite...

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...as in "to spite his face, he cut off his nose"... yeah, that spite...

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So in spite of the cold, the search team... blah blah blah...

01:00

Let's take a quick scan of the answers to see if there's anything that stands out.

01:05

Well, option A looks pretty good -- dedicated and hardworking.

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If you replaced the word stalwart with dedicated and hardworking, the sentence would totally

01:15

make sense.

01:16

The other answer choices... eih, not so much.

01:19

The unreliable search team? No way -- they're fighting the snow and cold and misery to find

01:24

their little mountain climber.

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How about answer C: the search team wasn't at an impasse -- they were working, moving,

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doing, acting...

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...hopefully, if you didn't know what impasse meant you'd recognize the pass in there

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and figure that the "im" meant "ain't gonna" or "not" or something like that...

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D is kinda the curveball tricky answer because it's not awful.

01:48

If a team is experienced, presumably they've fought cold before....

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...but in this case, experienced isn't a direct simile for stalwart.

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These questions want the BEST answer, not the perfect one and A -- dedicated and hardworking...

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...is better than D, experienced.

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So it's A. As in... Always look behind a mountain lion's back.

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