WLC Hispanic Culture Practice Test

Cognates are words that look alike in two or more languages and share a related meaning because they come from a common ancestor. This shared origin explains why their spellings and sounds are similar and why their meanings stay close. For example, the English word animal and the Spanish palabra animal come from the same Latin root and both refer to living creatures. Recognizing cognates helps you guess meanings across languages and build vocabulary faster. The other ideas don’t fit as well: false cognates look similar but have different meanings, loanwords are borrowed terms that may not keep the original sense, and synonyms are words with similar meanings within one language rather than across languages.