English Vocabulary in Use: Advanced Book with Answers and Enhanced eBook Vocabulary Reference and Practice 3rd Edition

Answer these questions.
1 Do you think that using gender-specific language affects people’s attitudes to men and women’s 
roles in society?
2 Does your language ever use male words generically? If so, give examples of words you use to 
avoid gender stereotyping.
3 How do you feel about imposing language changes of the different kinds that David Crystal 
describes?
4 Do terms of address (i.e. Mr, Mrs, etc.) in your language indicate whether people are married?
5 Do you think it is better if terms of address indicate marital status or not? Why?
6 A grammatical problem in this area is the use of 
he
/
his
to refer to a person of either gender. In the 
sentence ‘A government minister may have to neglect his family’, the minister could be a man or 
a woman. However, the use of ‘his’ assumes, perhaps wrongly, that it is a man. How could you 
rewrite this sentence to avoid this problem?
99.1
99.2
99.3
99.4

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206
English Vocabulary in Use Advanced
In the headlines
100
Features of headline language
If a story 
hits the headlines it suddenly receives a lot of attention in the news.
Here are two typical examples of headlines from 
tabloid newspapers with comments on their use of 
language. 
[popular papers with small pages and short simple reports]
EXPERT REVEALS NEW CLOUD DANGERS
• Articles, prepositions and auxiliary verbs are oft en omitted from headlines.
• This use of the present simple instead of the past tense makes the story sound more immediate.
• The use of language is oft en ambiguous. It is not entirely clear, for example, what 
cloud refers to 
here. It is actually about the dangers of storing electronic information on a ‘cloud’ 
[hosted services 
on the internet for storing personal data]
, but it could have referred to dangers relating to the weather. 
Readers have to look at the story in order to find out.
• Words with dramatic associations such as 
danger are oft en used.
TV STAR TRAGIC TARGET FOR CRAZED GUNMAN
This story is about how a well-known television actor was shot by a mentally unstable killer.
• In order to attract readers’ attention, tabloid newspapers oft en feature celebrities, e.g. film/pop 
stars and sports personalities.
• Alliteration such as