English is the study of the English language. The goal is to improve communication skills by practicing listening, speaking, reading, writing, and understanding language rules like pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Undergraduate students in psychology and education come to their first course in statistics with diverse expectation of and background in mathematics. Some have considerable formal training and quantitative aptitude and look forward to learning statistics. Others – perhaps the majority, including some of those who aspire to postgraduate studies – are less confident in their quantitative skills. They regard a course in statistics as a necessary evil for the understanding or carrying out of research in their chosen fields, but an evil nonetheless.
The third edition, like the predecessors, is directed primarily at the latter audience it was written with the conviction that statistical concepts can be described simply without loss of accuracy and that understanding statistical techniques as research tools can be effectively promoted by discussing them within the context of their application to concrete data rather than as pure abstraction. Further, its contents are limited to those statistical techniques that are widely used in the literature of psychology and to the principle underlying them.
The changes that have been made in this edition reflect both the results of our teaching experience and the increasing prominence being given by statisticians to certain topics. Thus our discussion of some procedures, particularly those in the realm of descriptive statistics, which students grasp easily, have being shortened or rearranged. The treatment of other topics has been expanded. Greater emphasis has been placed on sampling theory, hypothesis testing, and the notion at statistical power.
The changes that were made in the book were motivated by Options:The emergence of a standard dialect produces the phenomenon known as ‘accent’ which is quite different from dialect. In the process of learning a foreign language, it is normal to transfer the patterns of an indigenous language to those of the foreign language. With time, however those of form and most of orthography and phonology gradually get eliminated. This is because these can easily be identified and corrected. They are easy to correct because they do not involve patterns of muscular movement. It is necessary to correct them because otherwise they could seriously impair intelligibility.
With phonetic patterns, on the other hand, there is a great deal of intelligibility tolerance because muscular patterns are involved thus making correction difficult when observed. Besides, phonetic patterns do not impair intelligibility much. Hence the transference of phonetic habits from one language to another is both easier to tolerate and more difficult to avoid than transference at the lexico-grammatical level. It follows that a speaker who is learning a second dialect does so with an accent since the muscles of his speech organs would have crystallized in response to the phonetics of his native language which he learnt first. The speaker therefore speaks the second dialect with the phonetic features of his native dialect. The learning of a standard language is simply the learning of a second dialect- that which has been standardized.
Members of a language community control at least two dialects and use both dialects in different situations. In the rural areas, the native dialect is used in most situations since there is less movement. Therefore, rural dwellers tend to be parochial and maintain the homogeneity of their dialect. In the urban community, on the other hand, there is more demand on the standard dialect than on the rural one. This is because people from different regions converge here. In order to ensure mutual intelligibility resulting from the pressure of communication, a great deal of demand is made on the standard dialect which now becomes the lingua frenca amongst them.
Choose the most appropriate option opposite in meaning of the underlined word.
Our party is wielding potent political power?
Options:In the question below, choose the option nearest in meaning to the word or phase in italics.
Many people used to live in poverty.
Select the option that best explains the information conveyed in the sentence.
As regards the matter, we have crossed the rubicon.
Options:The land was ready and ploughed, waiting for the crops. At night, the earth was alive with insects singing and rustling about in search of food. But suddenly, by mid-November, the rain fled away: the rain-clouds fled away and left the sky bare. The sun danced dizzily in the sky, with a strange cruelty. Each day the land was covered in a haze of mist as the sun sucked up the drop of moisture out of the earth. The family set down in despair, waiting and waiting,. Their hopes had run so high; the goats has started producing milk, which they had eagerly poured on their porridge, now they ate plain porridge with no milk. It was impossible to plant the corn, maize, pumpkin and water-melon seeds in the dry earth. They sat the whole day in the shadow of the huts and even stopped thinking, for the rain had fled away. Only the children were quite happy in their little girl world. They carried on with their game of making house like their mother and chattered to each other in light, soft tones. They made children from sticks around which they tied rags, and scolded them severely in an exact imitation of their own mother. Their voices could be heard, scolding all day long: ‘You stupid thing, when I send you to draw water, why do you spill half of it out of the bucket? ‘You stupid thing! Can’t you mind the porridge pot without letting the porridge he burn? ‘Then, they would beat the rag-dolls on their bottoms with severe expressions.
The adults paid no attention to this; their nerves were stretched to breaking point waiting for the rain to fall out of the sky. Nothing was important, beyond that. All their animals had been sold during the bad years to purchase food and of all their herd only two goats were left. It was the women of the family who finally broke down under the strain of waiting for rain.
The family sat down in despair because Options:In the question below choose the expression which best complete the sentence:
My uncle told me, 'I have a large house and you are welcome to the protection it offers'. O my uncle told me that _____
Options:Choose the option nearest in meaning to the word underlined:
One of the twins was as daring as the other was _____.
Options:Fill in the gap with the most appropriate option from the list provided?
My friend and I have been quarrelling since yesterday and we haven't _____ yet?
Options: