What Does the Structure of the Word "Altruistic" Tell the Reader About Its Meaning?

The answer

Breaking a word into its parts — its morphemes — lets you predict its meaning before you ever open a dictionary. "Altruistic" splits cleanly into a root and a suffix:

• altru- comes from the French autrui and ultimately the Latin alter, both meaning "other" or "other people." This is the same alter found in alternate, alternative, and alter ego.
• -ist- carries the idea of a person who does or believes something (as in altruist, one who practices concern for others).
• -ic is an adjective-forming suffix meaning "of, relating to, or having the nature of" (as in heroic, artistic, poetic).

Put the pieces together and the structure literally spells out the meaning: "having the nature of [concern for] other people." So altruistic means unselfishly caring about the welfare of others rather than oneself. On a reading or vocabulary test, the correct choice is the one that says the word's parts point to caring for others — because the root refers to other people and the suffix marks it as a describing (adjective) word.

Why the other options are wrong

Typical distractors on this question include:

• "It tells you the word is a noun." Wrong — the -ic suffix marks an adjective, not a noun. The noun form is altruism; the person is an altruist.
• "It tells you the word is negative / means selfish." Wrong — nothing in altru- signals selfishness. The root points outward to others, the opposite of self-focus. (Selfish traces to ego- or self-, not alter-.)
• "The structure gives no clue to meaning." Wrong — that is the whole point of morphology: a recognizable root plus a familiar suffix does reveal meaning, which is exactly what the question is testing.
• "It relates to art / high skill" (confusing -istic with 'artistic'). Wrong — the shared -istic ending is coincidental; meaning comes from the root, and here the root is altru- (other), not art-.

The bigger picture

This question is really teaching a transferable reading strategy: use word parts to unlock unfamiliar vocabulary. When you meet a hard word on a test, isolate the root (the core meaning), then read the prefix and suffix as modifiers. Bio- (life) + -logy (study of) = biology. Un- (not) + predict + -able = not able to be predicted. Applying that to altruistic, the root altru- answers "what is it about?" (other people) and the suffix -ic answers "what kind of word is it?" (a describing adjective). Recognizing that a French/Latin root for "other" sits at the word's core is what separates a confident answer from a guess — and it is exactly the analytical move standardized tests reward.