Relative is a word with two very different meanings that you'll encounter often.

When talking about family, a relative is someone you're related to by blood or marriage: your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on. Your relatives might gather for Thanksgiving dinner or send you birthday cards. Some relatives live nearby, while others you might only see at family reunions.

In a completely different sense, relative means “compared to something else” or “depending on the situation.” When your teacher says a math problem is relatively easy, she means it's easy compared to other problems you've been solving. If you're visiting Colorado and someone mentions that Denver sits at a relatively low elevation, they mean low for Colorado, even though Denver is actually a mile above sea level.

This second meaning shows up constantly in everyday thinking. Whether something is big or small, fast or slow, hot or cold depends on what you're comparing it to. A rabbit is large relative to a mouse but small relative to a horse. Scientists use the phrase relative to when making careful comparisons: “The moon is small relative to Earth.”