Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
cement
comment
lament
moment
Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
persuasion
extension
confusion
explosion
Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
exhalation
exacerbation
execution
excavation
Choose the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress.
Choose the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress.
My neighbor is _____; he is always showing that he never cares about his bad behavior.
Employees who have a _____ are encouraged to discuss it with the management.
He was arrested because he answered to the description of the _____ man.
Salaries have not _____ inflation in the last few years.
His comments _____ little or no relation to the facts and the figures of the case.
I wish you'd do the accounts. I don't have _____ for numbers.
Nathalie seems very tough at work. She's a completely different person at home _____.
He sent his children to the park so that he could have some _____.
David was deported on account of his expired visa. He _____ it renewed.
Mr. Peter is the big _____ in the company as he has just been promoted to the position of Managing Director.
We spent nearly 3 hours waiting outside the station, then out _____.
The needs of gifted children in schools have long been _____ neglected.
Six novels a year, you say? He's certainly a _____ writer.
With this type of insurance, you're buying _____ of mind.
I have just taken a Test of English as a Foreign Language or TOEFL _____ short.
Complete the sentence by changing the form of the word in capitals.
Tourism, holidaymaking and travel are these days more significant social phenomena than most (COMMENT) have considered. Tourism is a leisure activity which (SUPPOSE) its opposite namely regulated or organized work. It is one manifestation of how work and leisure are organized as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in modern societies. Indeed, acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being modern and the popular (CONCEIVE) of tourism is that it is organized within particular places and occurs for (REGULAR) periods of time. Tourist relationships arise from a movement of people to and their stay in various destinations. This (INSTRUMENT) involves some movement that is a new place or places. The journey and the stay are, by definition, outside the normal places of residence and work, and are of a short-term and temporary nature, and there is a clear intention to return home within a relatively short period of time.
A (SUBSTANCE) proportion of the population of modern societies engages in such tourist practices. New socialized forms of provision have developed in order to cope with the mass character of the gazes of tourists as opposed to the individual character of travel. Places are chosen to be visited and be gazed upon because there is an anticipation especially through daydreaming and (FANTASIA) of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those (CUSTOM) encountered. Such anticipation is constructed and sustained through a variety of (TOUR) practices such as film, TV, literature, magazine, records and videos which construct and (FORCE) this daydreaming.
Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.
along the way, Black Friday made the giant leap from congested streets and crowded stores to fevered shoppers fist-fighting over parking spaces and pepper-spraying each other as they tussle the last Tickle Me Elmo. When did Black Friday become the frenzy, over-the-top shopping event it is today?
That would be in the 2000s when Black Friday was officially designated the biggest shopping day of the year. Until then, that had gone to the Saturday before Christmas. Yet as more and more retailers started touting "can't miss" post-Thanksgiving sales and the Black Friday discounts grew deeper and deeper, American consumers could no longer the pull of this magical shopping day.
Retailers may spend an year planning their Black Friday sales. They use the day as an opportunity to offer rock- prices on overstock inventory and to offer doorbusters and discounts on seasonal items, such as holiday decorations and typical holiday gifts. Retailers also offer significant discounts on big-ticket items and top-selling brands of TVs, smart devices, and other electronics, luring customers in the hope that inside, they will purchase higher-margin goods. The contents of Black Friday advertisements are often so anticipated that retailers go to great to ensure that they don't leak out publically beforehand.
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
TECHNOLOGY
When faced with some new and possibly bewildering technological change, most people react in one of two . They either recoil from anything new, claiming that it is unnecessary or too complicated or that it somehow makes life less than . Or they learn to to the new invention, and eventually how they could possibly have existed without it. Take computers as an example. For many of us, they still represent a to our freedom and give us a frightening sense of a future in which all will be taken by machines. This may be because they seem mysterious, and difficult to understand. Ask most people what you can use a home computer for, and you usually get answers about how 'they give you information'. In fact, even those of us who are familiar with computers, and use them in our daily work, have very little idea of how they work. But it does not take long to learn how to operate a business program, even if things occasionally go wrong for no apparent reason. Presumably much the same happened when the telephone and the television became . What seems to alarm most people is the speed of technological change, rather than the change itself. And the that are made to new technology may well have a point to them since change is not always an improvement. As discover during power cuts, there is a lot to be said for the oil lamp, the coal fire, and forms of entertainment, such as books or board games, that don't have to be into work.
Read the following passage then choose the best answer to each question below.
Graphic novels: a fresh angle on literature
Has the graphic novel - a fictional story presented in comic-strip format finally become intellectually respectable?
Graphic novels have just landed with an almighty kersplat. Ten days ago, two such works were shortlisted for the Shakespeare Book Awards for the first time in the history of the prize, in two different categories. This was no publicity stunt neither panel knew what the other had done. This is, surely, the moment when the graphic book finally made its entrance into the respectable club roam of high literature. Hang on, though, can you compare a graphic novel with the literary kind? Wouldn't that be like comparing a painting with a music video? Or is it time we started seeing them as comparable mediums for storytelling? If so, what next?
Robert Macfarlane, the chairman of another major literary award, says he has no objection in principle to a graphic novel being submitted for the prize. In fact, he has taught one, Art Spiegelman's Maus, alongside the works of Russian writer Tolstoy and Don Quixote by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes) at the University of Cambridge, where he works in the English Faculty, 'The idea of outlawing the graphic novel doesn't make any sense to me,' he says. 'I don't segregate it from the novel. The novel is always eating up other languages, media and forms.' Graphic fiction, he says, is 'another version of the novel's long flirtation with the visual'. This is, he declares, 'a golden age for the graphic novel'.
And he's right. We are seeing a boom in graphic novels. Since Maus was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, they have gone on to devour every literary genre going. But so far, graphic novels have politely stood aside and let conventional books win the big prizes. Now they want the vote. Fighting for the graphic novelists' cause, astonishingly, are some hefty prize-winning writers. The English novelist and poet A. S. Byatt is passionately in favour of graphic novels competing with regular ones. Byatt, who is a huge fan of Spiegelman's Maus, thinks that French-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis and 'head and shoulders above most novels being produced. It's more interesting and more moving. It's able to be serious because it can carry itself along on this unserious form. It allowed her to be witty about things that are terrible. And that is why it's a major work of art'.
The genius of the graphic novel, as the English writer Philip Pullman explains, is that it can bring into play so many levels of narrative by layering them on top of each other. Take American Alison Bechdel's brilliant Are You My Mother? - in a single page, she can depict a memory of being with her mother in her childhood, dialogue between herself and her mother as they chat on the phone in the present, plus an image of herself toiling at her desk, trying to write her memoir. And what Bechdel and her mum are saying on the phone links to the diaries of the early 20th-century writer Virginia Woolf, which Bechdel also brings to visual life. Try doing that with words - it would take a chapter, Bechdel does it in a few panels. That in the end is precisely what keeps graphic literature so distinct from prose narrative.
Graphic novels and traditional novels demand, to be sure, the same amours of time, intellect and artistry from their authors. But that doesn't mean they're the same thing. A few years on, will you be clicking the buy button on a graphic novel as happily as you'd pick up a work by a traditional novelist? Even Bechdel confesses that her reading habits are still struggling out of the past. 'Honestly, I would be slightly more inclined to pick up a non-graphic work,' she says. At this point, there's not a huge number of graphic novels that are about topics that interest me. But that too is changing. We're becoming more visually Iiterate. There's some reason for these graphic novels creeping into the canon. We're reading differently from how we used to 200 years ago.
What does the writer say about the nomination of two graphic novels for the Shakespeare Book Awards?
What does Robert Macfarlane suggest about graphic novels?
In the third paragraph, the writer suggests that, in the past, writers of graphic novels _____.
The word "hefty" is closest in meaning _____.
The writer discusses Alison Bechdel's book to make the point that graphic novels _____.
Bechdel is quoted in the last paragraph to make the point that _____.
In this article, the writer is _____.
Read the following passage and choose which of the headings from A - K match the blanks. There are two extra headings, which do not match any of the paragraphs.
List of headings
A. A description of the procedure
B. An international research project
C. An experiment to investigate consumer responses
D. Marketing an alternative name
E. A misleading name
F. A potentially profitable line of research
G. Medical dangers of the technique
H. Drawbacks to marketing tools
I. Broadening applications
K. What is neuromarketing?
Inside the mind of the consumer
Could brain-scanning technology provide an accurate way to assess the appeal of new products and the effectiveness of advertising?
1.
MARKETING people are no longer prepared to take your word for it that you favor one product over another. They want to scan your brain to see which one you really prefer. Using the tools of neuroscientists, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) mapping and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they are trying to learn more about the mental processes behind purchasing decisions. The resulting fusion of neuroscience and marketing is inevitably, being called 'neuromarketing’.
2.
The first person to apply brain-imaging technology in this way was Gerry Zaltman of Harvard University, in the late 1990s. The idea remained in obscurity until 2001, when BrightHouse, a marketing consultancy based in Atlanta, Georgia, set up a dedicated neuromarketing arm, BrightHouse Neurostrategies Group. (BrightHouse lists Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot among its clients.) But the company's name may itself simply be an example of clever marketing. BrightHouse does not scan people while showing them specific products or campaign ideas but bases its work on the results of more general fMRI-based research into consumer preferences and decision-making carried out at Emory University in Atlanta.
3.
Can brain-scanning really be applied to marketing? The basic principle is not that different from focus groups and other traditional forms of market research. A volunteer lies in an fMRI machine and is shown images or video clips. In place of an interview or questionnaire, the subject's response is evaluated by monitoring brain activity. fMRIprovides real-time images of brain activity, in which different areas “light up” depending on the level of blood flow. This provides clues to the subject's subconscious thought patterns. Neuroscientists know, for example, that the sense of self is associated with an area of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex. A flow of blood to that area while the subject is looking at a particular logo suggests that he or she identifies with that brand.
4.
At first, it seemed that only companies in Europe were prepared to admit that they used neuromarketing. Two carmakers, DaimlerChrysler in Germany and Ford's European arm, ran pilot studies in 2003. But more recently, American companies have become more open about their use of neuromarketing. Lieberman Research Worldwide, a marketing firm based in Los Angeles, is collaborating with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to enable movie studios to market-test film trailers. More controversially, the New York Times recently reported that a political consultancy, FKF Research, has been studying the effectiveness of campaign commercials using neuromarketing techniques.
5.
Whether all this is any more than a modern-day version of phrenology, the Victorian obsession with linking lumps and bumps in the skull to personality traits, is unclear. There have been no large-scale studies, so scans of a handful of subjects may not be a reliable guide to consumer behaviour in general. Of course, focus groups and surveys are flawed too: strong personalities can steer the outcomes of focus groups, and people do not always tell opinion pollsters the truth. And even honest people cannot always explain their preferences.
6.
That is perhaps where neuromarketing has the most potential. When asked about cola drinks, most people claim to have a favorite brand, but cannot say why they prefer that brand’s taste. An unpublished study of attitudes towards two well-known cola drinks. Brand A and Brand 13. carried out last year in a college of medicine in the US found that most subjects preferred Brand B in a blind tasting fMRI scanning showed that drinking Brand B lit up a region called the ventral putamen, which is one of the brain s ‘reward centres’, far more brightly than Brand A. But when told which drink was which, most subjects said they preferred Brand A, which suggests that its stronger brand outweighs the more pleasant taste of the other drink.
7.
“People form many unconscious attitudes that are obviously beyond traditional methods that utilize introspection,” says Steven Quartz, a neuroscientist at Caltech who is collaborating with Lieberman Research. With over $100 billion spent each year on marketing in America alone, any firm that can more accurately analyze how customers respond to products, brands and advertising could make a fortune.
8.
Consumer advocates are wary. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a lobby group, thinks existing marketing techniques are powerful enough. “Already, marketing is deeply implicated in many serious pathologies,” he says. “That is especially true of children, who are suffering from an epidemic of marketing-related diseases, including obesity and type-2 diabetes. Neuromarketing is a tool to amplify these trends.”
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Sean did all the illustrations for the book but no one acknowledged his work. CREDIT
=> Sean wasn't ............
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
You've been looking miserable all day. MOON
=> You've ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
He was terribly upset by the news. BLOW
=> The news came ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
I expected the film to be good, but it wasn't at all. LIVE
=> .........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
They may have escaped through the backdoor. GETAWAY
=> They ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The government have been reviewing their immigration policy for some time.
=> The government's ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The restoration of communications and essential services is of prime importance for the council.
=> The first ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The house shouldn't be left unlocked for any reason.
=> Not ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
My salary is half what I would be in the job I was offered in January.
=> If ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
I find his clothes the most irritating about him.
=> What most .....