Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

9. Finish the sentences in your own words
1. If your answers parallel those of most young people, you add to 
the proof that ... 2. Parents and teachers agree that... 3. An experiment 
recently conducted in Europe by the Society for Rational Psychol-
ogy showed that... 4. According to a recent research report ... . 5. Be-
fore they are old enough for school...... 6. The most powerful ideas are 
the ones ...... . 7. Words introduced in the media frequently enlarge 
into ... . 8. The impact of the mass media is very strong. It changes .... .
9. Some adults, for that matter, either do not know or refuse to admit 
the following basic fact of media production:..... 10. The owner’s 
policies, therefore,..... 11. Some of the media output has .....
10. Match the words on the left with the words on the right. Then write the 
sentences incorporating these word combinations
(A)
1 tawdry 
a electricity
2 at/on a superficial 
b output
3 to be transmitted by
c strips
4 a stationary 
d in a vicious circle
5 to be trapped 
e birds in captivity
6 to rear 
f level
7 comic 
g microphone
8 media 
h jewellery and fake furs
(B)
1 an advertising 
a writer
2 charitable
b with the launch of smb’s 
new book

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3 a continuity 
c of competing for smb’s 
attention
4 to express one’s appreciation 
d investors out of millions 
of dollars
5 to be arranged to coincide 
e motives
6 to despair
f agency
7 to charm credulous 
g of the technical skills 
involved
8 to be guided by entirely
h donation
altruistic
11. Answer the following questions and do the given assignment
a)
1. How influential a part does the TV play in children’s lives? 
Do recollections of TV programmes provide the most part of the 
majority of young people’s childhood memories? 2. Why do you 
think people often refer to “the media” when talking about televi-
sion? 3. Why do the electronic media tend to cause more problems 
than the print media? 4. Are the additional implications of the 
word “mass” accurate? 5. How do you think watching television 
can become addictive? 6. How is it known that some attitudes are 
absorbed indirectly from the television and then retained? Account 
for media consumers’ being “subtly conditioned and brainwashed”. 
7. Does the television always achieve its intended predetermined 
response from its audience? Is it more successful than the other 
forms of media? 8. How does the media’s influence on the language 
manifest itself? 9.How independent are those people working for 
the television companies? 10. In the last sentence the pros and 
cons of television are put rather bluntly. Which outweigh the 
other? Is the general tone of the essay more pessimistic or more 
optimistic?
b)
The text under discussion is an essay, a short literary prose 
composition in which a subject is discussed in a personal manner. 
The word 
essay
was coined by Michel de Montaigne, whose 
Essais 
(1580) are informal and intimate discussions. Behind the essay 
the traditions of oratory and debate lie. From them all essays 
inherit their persuasion techniques. The essay may usually be 
identified by certain characteristics of tone, language, and struc-
ture. Keeping all above mentioned in mind, study the text and 
provide examples to illustrate the main features of the essay: 

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1) tone: personal and conversational versus highbrow and formal; 
2) language: informal and colloquial versus official and stylized; 
3) structure: loose, flexible versus strictly and logically organized; 
4) lexical and syntactical devices aimed to persuade: repetition 
(repeating of a word within a sentence in order to emphasize), 
parallel constructions (balance of two or more similar phrases or 
clauses aimed at enhancing the clearness of thought and read-
ability), homogeneous members of the sentence, rhetorical ques-
tions (utterances in the form of question which pronounce judge-
ments), asyndeton (deliberate avoidance of conjunctions), 
inversion (inverted word order aimed at attaching logical stress 
to the surface meaning of the utterance). Which of the mentioned 
above stylistic devices does the author use as persuasion tech-
niques in the essay under analysis?