Angels & Demons: Build vocabulary with a thriller

The film Angels & Demons, based on the best-selling thriller written by Dan Brown, is supposed to be released on 13 May. It tells how, on the day the new pope is being chosen, a ticking bomb connected to a container of antimatter is hidden someplace in the Vatican, while several of the Preferiti, or candidates for pope, become victims of murder.

No one at the Vatican can understand why any of these terrible things are occurring. Harvard University professor Robert Langdon, known for his research on symbols, is called in to help. He gets access to the Vatican archives and finds that symbolic messages left with the dead are evidence indicating that members of an old secret society called the Illuminati must be behind the murders. This organization, founded in the late 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment — Illuminati is Latin for "the enlightened ones" — is no longer believed to be active, but Langdon finds the murderers have chosen four major locations in Rome connected to what the Illuminati believed were the four main elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

In the final scene, Langdon becomes a hero as he ensures that Vatican City is saved from destruction. The book uses the historical conflict between science and religion as a device to tell a thrilling story.

The 13 words translated above are from Spotlight's Vocabulary Boost (5/2009). On the next page, explore them in context to start moving them from your passive to your active vocabulary.

Anne Hodgson