30 Essential Korean Words for the TOPIK Test - Social Studies

Enhance your TOPIK test preparation with these 30 essential social studies-related words. Learn their meanings and see example sentences to improve your vocabulary and score.

30 Essential Korean Words for the TOPIK Test - Social Studies
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Importance of Vocabulary for the TOPIK Test Vocabulary is a crucial component of the TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean) exam, particularly in the writing section. A strong vocabulary helps you understand questions, read passages more efficiently, and express your thoughts clearly and accurately. This is especially true for social studies topics, where specific terminology is often used. In this article, we'll cover 30 essential social studies-related words, including 15 nouns and 15 verbs/adjectives, along with example sentences to help you prepare for the TOPIK test. ๐Ÿ˜Š

Benefits of Learning Social Studies-Related Vocabulary Mastering social studies-related vocabulary can significantly boost your TOPIK score. These terms frequently appear in reading passages, essays, and multiple-choice questions. Understanding and using them correctly demonstrates your proficiency in both general and specialized Korean language use. ๐ŸŒŸ

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Nouns

  1. ๊ฒฝ์ œ (Economy)
    • Meaning: Economy
    • Example Sentence: ํ•œ๊ตญ์˜ ๊ฒฝ์ œ๋Š” ๋น ๋ฅด๊ฒŒ ์„ฑ์žฅํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The Korean economy is growing rapidly.)
  2. ์ •์น˜ (Politics)
    • Meaning: Politics
    • Example Sentence: ์ •์น˜์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ๊ด€์‹ฌ์ด ๋†’์•„์ง€๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Interest in politics is increasing.)
  3. ์‚ฌํšŒ (Society)
    • Meaning: Society
    • Example Sentence: ํ˜„๋Œ€ ์‚ฌํšŒ๋Š” ๋ณต์žกํ•˜๊ณ  ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Modern society is complex and diverse.)
  4. ๋ฌธํ™” (Culture)
    • Meaning: Culture
    • Example Sentence: ๋ฌธํ™”๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์˜ ์ƒํ™œ ๋ฐฉ์‹์„ ๋ฐ˜์˜ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Culture reflects people's way of life.)
  5. ์—ญ์‚ฌ (History)
    • Meaning: History
    • Example Sentence: ์—ญ์‚ฌ๋ฅผ ๊ณต๋ถ€ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ์ค‘์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Studying history is important.)
  6. ๊ต์œก (Education)
    • Meaning: Education
    • Example Sentence: ๊ต์œก์€ ๊ฐœ์ธ์˜ ๋ฐœ์ „์— ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์—ญํ• ์„ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Education plays an important role in personal development.)
  7. ๋ฒ•๋ฅ  (Law)
    • Meaning: Law
    • Example Sentence: ๋ฒ•๋ฅ ์„ ์ค€์ˆ˜ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ์‹œ๋ฏผ์˜ ์˜๋ฌด์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Following the law is a duty of citizens.)
  8. ์ธ๊ถŒ (Human Rights)
    • Meaning: Human Rights
    • Example Sentence: ์ธ๊ถŒ์€ ๋ชจ๋“  ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์—๊ฒŒ ์ค‘์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Human rights are important for everyone.)
  9. ์„ ๊ฑฐ (Election)
    • Meaning: Election
    • Example Sentence: ์„ ๊ฑฐ๋Š” ๋ฏผ์ฃผ์ฃผ์˜์˜ ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ๋ถ€๋ถ„์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Elections are an important part of democracy.)
  10. ์–ธ๋ก  (Media)
    • Meaning: Media
    • Example Sentence: ์–ธ๋ก ์€ ์‚ฌํšŒ์— ํฐ ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์นฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The media has a significant impact on society.)
  11. ์ •๋ถ€ (Government)
    • Meaning: Government
    • Example Sentence: ์ •๋ถ€๋Š” ๊ตญ๋ฏผ์˜ ๋ณต์ง€๋ฅผ ์ฑ…์ž„์ง‘๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The government is responsible for the welfare of its citizens.)
  12. ์ •์ฑ… (Policy)
    • Meaning: Policy
    • Example Sentence: ์ •๋ถ€์˜ ์ •์ฑ…์€ ๊ฒฝ์ œ์— ํฐ ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์นฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Government policies greatly affect the economy.)
  13. ๋ณต์ง€ (Welfare)
    • Meaning: Welfare
    • Example Sentence: ๋ณต์ง€ ์ •์ฑ…์€ ์‚ฌํšŒ์˜ ์•ฝ์ž๋ฅผ ๋ณดํ˜ธํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Welfare policies protect the vulnerable in society.)
  14. ํ™˜๊ฒฝ (Environment)
    • Meaning: Environment
    • Example Sentence: ํ™˜๊ฒฝ ๋ณดํ˜ธ๋Š” ์šฐ๋ฆฌ์˜ ์ฑ…์ž„์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Protecting the environment is our responsibility.)
  15. ๋…ธ๋™ (Labor)
    • Meaning: Labor
    • Example Sentence: ๋…ธ๋™ ์‹œ์žฅ์€ ์ง€์†์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋ณ€ํ™”ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The labor market is constantly changing.)

Verbs and Adjectives

  1. ํˆฌํ‘œํ•˜๋‹ค (To Vote)
    • Meaning: To Vote
    • Example Sentence: ๋งŽ์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ๋Œ€ํ†ต๋ น ์„ ๊ฑฐ์— ํˆฌํ‘œํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Many people voted in the presidential election.)
  2. ๊ต์œกํ•˜๋‹ค (To Educate)
    • Meaning: To Educate
    • Example Sentence: ์ข‹์€ ๊ต์œก์€ ๋ฏธ๋ž˜๋ฅผ ๋ฐ๊ฒŒ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Good education brightens the future.)
  3. ๋ณดํ˜ธํ•˜๋‹ค (To Protect)
    • Meaning: To Protect
    • Example Sentence: ์ •๋ถ€๋Š” ์‹œ๋ฏผ์„ ๋ณดํ˜ธํ•ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The government must protect its citizens.)
  4. ๋ณ€ํ™”ํ•˜๋‹ค (To Change)
    • Meaning: To Change
    • Example Sentence: ์‚ฌํšŒ๋Š” ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด ์ง€๋‚˜๋ฉด์„œ ๋ณ€ํ™”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Society changes over time.)
  5. ๊ฒฐ์ •ํ•˜๋‹ค (To Decide)
    • Meaning: To Decide
    • Example Sentence: ์šฐ๋ฆฌ๋Š” ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ๋ฌธ์ œ๋ฅผ ๊ฒฐ์ •ํ•ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (We need to decide on important issues.)
  6. ๊ฐœ๋ฐœํ•˜๋‹ค (To Develop)
    • Meaning: To Develop
    • Example Sentence: ์ƒˆ๋กœ์šด ๊ธฐ์ˆ ์ด ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (New technology has been developed.)
  7. ํ† ๋ก ํ•˜๋‹ค (To Discuss)
    • Meaning: To Discuss
    • Example Sentence: ์šฐ๋ฆฌ๋Š” ๊ทธ ๋ฌธ์ œ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ํ† ๋ก ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (We discussed the issue.)
  8. ํ•ด๊ฒฐํ•˜๋‹ค (To Solve)
    • Meaning: To Solve
    • Example Sentence: ์ด ๋ฌธ์ œ๋ฅผ ํ•ด๊ฒฐํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ๋งŽ์€ ๋…ธ๋ ฅ์ด ํ•„์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (A lot of effort is needed to solve this problem.)
  9. ์ฆ๊ฐ€ํ•˜๋‹ค (To Increase)
    • Meaning: To Increase
    • Example Sentence: ์ธ๊ตฌ๊ฐ€ ๋งค๋…„ ์ฆ๊ฐ€ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The population is increasing every year.)
  10. ๊ฐ์†Œํ•˜๋‹ค (To Decrease)
    • Meaning: To Decrease
    • Example Sentence: ๋ฒ”์ฃ„์œจ์ด ๊ฐ์†Œํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (The crime rate is decreasing.)
  11. ์ฐธ์—ฌํ•˜๋‹ค (To Participate)
    • Meaning: To Participate
    • Example Sentence: ๋งŽ์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ๊ทธ ํ–‰์‚ฌ์— ์ฐธ์—ฌํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Many people participated in the event.)
  12. ์ง€์›ํ•˜๋‹ค (To Support)
    • Meaning: To Support
    • Example Sentence: ๋งŽ์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ๊ทธ ๋‹จ์ฒด๋ฅผ ์ง€์›ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Many people support the organization.)
  13. ์ฃผ์žฅํ•˜๋‹ค (To Assert)
    • Meaning: To Assert
    • Example Sentence: ๊ทธ๋Š” ์ž์‹ ์˜ ์˜๊ฒฌ์„ ๊ฐ•ํ•˜๊ฒŒ ์ฃผ์žฅํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (He strongly asserted his opinion.)
  14. ์—ฐ๊ตฌํ•˜๋‹ค (To Research)
    • Meaning: To Research
    • Example Sentence: ๊ณผํ•™์ž๋“ค์€ ์ƒˆ๋กœ์šด ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ•์„ ์—ฐ๊ตฌํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Scientists are researching new methods.)
  15. ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์น˜๋‹ค.  (To Influence)
    • Meaning: To Influence
    • Example Sentence: ๋ฏธ๋””์–ด๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์˜ ์ƒ๊ฐ์— ์˜ํ–ฅ์„ ๋ฏธ์นฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Media influences people's thoughts.)

Summary of Vocabulary Importance Mastering these 30 essential social studies-related words will significantly enhance your TOPIK test preparation. These terms frequently appear in reading passages, essays, and multiple-choice questions, making them vital for understanding and responding accurately.

Encouragement to Practice Incorporate these words into your daily practice to ensure they become a natural part of your vocabulary. Use them in sentences, practice with friends, and test yourself regularly. ๐Ÿ“š

AI Writing Practice Program To further enhance your vocabulary and writing skills, consider using our AI writing practice program. This program offers personalized feedback and suggests various Chinese character recommendations to help you expand your vocabulary efficiently. Regular practice with this tool can save you time and reduce mistakes, ensuring you are well-prepared for the TOPIK test. ๐Ÿš€


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