Briggs Bridging the Gap (BTG) Medical Interpreter Training Practice Test

The concept here is a prefix that conveys bad or faulty quality. mal- serves that purpose in medical terms, signaling something unhealthy, faulty, or abnormal. You can see it in words like malnutrition (poor nutrition), malfunction (faulty functioning), and malformation (abnormal shape). The other prefixes describe size or rate of change: macro- means large, micro- means small, and hyper- means above normal or excessive. So mal- is the one that directly means “bad.”