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Issue #038 -- Week 25/01/15-31/01/15 February 03, 2015 |
Hello,Greetings and General InformationA warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world! Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. A new and valuable addition to the website is the comments feature that can facilitate your communication 24/7 from now on. Your messages will be monitored and accepted or denied, depending on the content and the attitude, but NOT on the grammar, spelling and overall correctness of your input. I have offered the service of correcting messages retrospectively, as a constructive contribution to your continuous improvement. Do participate and make this place feel like a community. You and your friends can always subscribe individually through the form on My English Club. If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Month 6 ~ Lesson 22We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building. Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading. You can find our past lessons as follows: Pronunciation: Reading ~ Finding Factual InformationReading Skills for TOEFL [5] This is not a very difficult type of question in a TOEFL exam, as these multiple-choice questions are often restatements of what is given in the passage and they are generally given in the order the information appears in the passage, AND the questions usually indicate the number of the paragraph containing the answers. In this sense, the answers are not too difficult to locate. Look at one simple example: Ghost Words "A ghost word is a non-existent word that has made its way into a reference work by mistake. One well-known example of a ghost word is the word “Dord”, which appeared in a 1934 American dictionary defined as density, as it is used in physics and chemistry. ”Dord” was added to the dictionary when a typsetter who was making entries into the dictionary misread the entry “D or d” and typed it as “Dord”. In reality, the letter “d” (or its capitalized version “D”) was used to refer to density in physics or chemistry. When the error was discovered, the ghost word “Dord” was removed from the dictionary. Not all ghost words are recognised as errors, removed from reference works, and forgotten. One example of a well-established ghost word is the word “syllabus”. The Roman writer Cicero had correctly used the Latin word sittabus in his writings to refer to the title and author label on a manuscript. In a 1470 edition of Cicero’s works, sittabus was miswritten as “syllabus”; the miswritten ghost word “syllabus” has now achieved status as a commonly used word referring to an outline of the contents of a course." Question 1: According to paragraph 1, the word “Dord” The question asks you to answer a question according to paragraph 1, which means that the correct answer is factual information from the first paragraph. It is stated in the first paragraph that “Dord” was added to the dictionary when a typesetter… misread the entry “D or d.” This means that the word “Dord” was mistakenly added to a dictionary. To answer this question, you should select the second answer: B). Question 2: It is indicated in paragraph 2, that the word “syllabus” In paragraph 2 of the passage it is stated that “sittabus was miswritten as syllabus”, which means that the word “syllabus” came about as a misspelling of a different word. The third option is correct here – C). What do you need to know, to succeed with questions like this? 1) How to identify the question: ( According to paragraph X…; it is stated/indicated/mentioned in paragraph X…)
2) Where to find the answer: this is generally indicated in the question; Grammar ~ Dividing Messages into Tone UnitsLast time I planned for us to step further, to work on dividing a message into tone units. This is done easier in speech than in writing, as the former is more variable in its structuring of information than the latter. A single sentence may have only one tone unit, as in: However, when the sentence is larger than, say ten words, the listener would be more comfortable if the message would come in a number of separate pieces of information: ¦“The zoo keeper told us about the mὸnkeys.”¦ Cutting up speech into tone units depends on such things as How do we know how to split our sentences into tone units? Usually we use a single tone unit for each sentence, meaning each sentence ends with a downward tone: ¦“I’d like some àpples.”¦ There are a few exceptions and this is when you have different tones: i) When a sentence starts with an adverbial phrase, this one gets a separate tone unit: ¦“Before he moved to Chína,¦my friend travelled around the wὸrld.”¦ ii) If there is an explanation within the sentence (a non-restrictive postmodifier, like a relative clause) we would give this a separate tone unit as well: ¦“The prettiest girl in the whole cláss,¦the one wearing a blue dress todǎy, is my brother’s gìrlfriend.”¦ iii) If we have a clause in the middle of a sentence, we mark it separately: ¦“And this is whý,¦as a result of the argument with his bóss,¦he quit his job in the ènd.”¦ iv) A vocative (when you call somebody) has its own tone unit: ¦“Ădam,¦ what are you dóing?”¦ v) The same applies to a linking adverb (however, altogether, in contrast) ¦“The teàcher ¦ howéver,¦wasn’t convinced that all the students understood the màtter.”¦ vi) When you have a clause or a long noun phrase acting as a subject, you also need to give it a separate tone unit: ¦“What he wǎnted ¦was a bit of èmpathy.”¦ vii) When two or more clauses are linked by coordination, each has a separate tone unit: ¦“The wizard took his wand out of his pockét ¦and cast a spell onto ùs.” ¦ Well, this is pretty much how this matter works. Once you understand it, I recommend you should build your own sentences following the examples here – make at least 5-10, to get the feel of the intonation in your sentences. After that, you’ll understand punctuation much better. Website Design ~ Credit Card and Payment ProcessingThe theme for this lesson is installing a credit card and payment processing facility on a website and, of all the options available, and we shall look at PayPal, as the simplest solution for the small online business owner. There are three types of PayPal business accounts: Standard, Advanced and Pro. The first one is free and the other two will charge you $5 and $30 per month respectively. The difference is that the Advanced option allows you to process credit cards on your website, but the Standard option doesn’t. In addition to being able to take payment on your site, the Pro option allows you to customize the checkout page and use PayPal's "Virtual Terminal." If you think your customers don't like to give their credit card number via a web page, you can use PayPal's Virtual Terminal to take payment on their behalf. Your customer provides their card number by phone, fax or mail, and you process the payment by logging in to your PayPal account. If in doubt, start with a Standard account. It is simple to upgrade to a paid option later. How do we install a PayPal facility on our website? First of all, you need to have a PayPal account. Then you need to log in and go through a two-step process: 1. In your PayPal account, click on Profile, My Selling Tools and then the update the link next to PayPal buttons. At the end of the creation process, copy the generated code. Types of buttons in PayPal PayPal will offer you a number of buttons and you can choose which type you want to install on any of the pages of your website: As for advanced features, you can opt for spam protection, track inventory, profit and loss calculations and a shipping calculator. As you can see, having PayPal on your website is not just having an extra button. It’s a complete set of merchant services tools, but there are alternatives, like for example e-Junkie, which offers more functionality. Some negative aspects of PayPal Some people will try to stay away from PayPal at any cost and you need to know about some of the downsides of this service as well. - Some customers will always refuse to use PayPal, whether they tell you or not; So, do not fear that all will be bad, if you opt for PayPal, but be sure to read all of PayPal's FAQs and tutorials on reducing disputes and credit card chargebacks (processes initiated by a credit card company) to protect your business from unnecessary paperwork and losses. In conclusion, despite their faults, PayPal remains the simplest and, arguably, the best online payment solution that exists for small business owners. However, if you want an alternative, Skrill.com (formerly Moneybookers) might be a good start. We’re in February already and this is a short month. As the next “day” in the SBI course, which in our schedule reverses into a month’ worth of lessons is about registering your domain name, and because we have no students in that situation, I will dedicate one or two more lessons to the topic of monetization and make that chapter shorter. So, we can look at the Monetization Forums next time and then to some final points on the matter, if necessary, in our last lesson on this subject. This Is It, Folks!I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're in the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on. Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club ! OK, I wish you all a great week ahead. Have fun, as always! My best wishes, Lucia da Vinci Founder of My English Club |
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