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.
You would think that common cold should be easy enough to study, but it is not as easy as it looks. Colds often seem to spread from one person to another, so it is often assumed that the cold must be infectious but there are some puzzling observations which do not fit with this theory. An investigator in Holland examined some eight thousand volunteers from different areas and came to the conclusion that in each group the colds all appeared at the same time-transfer of infection from case to case not account for that. Yet at the common cold research unit in Salisbury the infection theory has been tested out, two series of about two hundred people each were inoculated, one with salt water and the other with secretion from known cold victims. Only one of the sail-water group got a cold compared with seventy-three in the other group.
In the British Medical Journal the other day, there was a report of a meeting. ‘The common cold-fact and fancy’, at which one of the speakers reported a study of colds made in Cirencester over the last five years. Three hundred and fifty volunteers had kept diary records of their colds and on an average each had seven every year with an annual morbidity of seventy days. So nearly one-fifth of our lives are spent in more or less misery, coughing and sneezing. Some widely held beliefs about the common cold have turned out to be true. It seems that old people are just as liable to cold as the young. Sailors in isolated weather ships have just as many colds while on board and not in contact with the outside world as when on shore. It is truism that common illnesses pose more problems than the rare. The rare disease is by comparison much easier to handle. There are not so many cases and all of them have been intensively studied. Someone has read up all the literature about the disease and published a digest of it. There will be more facts and fewer fancies.
In the question below choose the option opposite in meaning to the word underlined:
The deafening noise of the two jet planes which flew across our compound yesterday made people fear that an assault on the country might be imminent
Options:Stress is by far the most common cause of ill health in our society and may be the underlying cause of as many as 70-80 per cent of all visits to family doctors. It is also the problem that every doctor shares with patients. Experts note that stress is an issue everyone can relate to experimentally. In studying and better understanding about stress, we can derive personal as well as professional benefits.
Stress can be overcome without undergoing duress. They often say anyone who wants to help someone deal with his/her stress should learn to handle his/her first. The manifestation of stress is legion. It can contribute or mimic just about any symptom you can think of. However, the main symptoms are physical, mental, emotional and behavioural. The cause of stress are multiple and varied but they can be classified into external and internal. External stressors can include relatively getting sick or dying, jobs being lost or people criticizing or one becoming angry. However, most of the stress people experience is self-generated.
Experts tell us that we create the majority of our upsets indicating that because we cause most of our own stress, we can do something about it. This gives us a measure of choice and control that we do not always have when outside forces act on us. This also leads to a basic premise about stress reduction. To master stress-change, you have to figure out what you are doing that is contributing to your problems and change it. These changes fall into behaviour, thinking, lifestyle choices and/ or situations you are in. by getting to the root causes of your stress, you can prevent recurrences.
As a way of draining off stress energy, nothing beats aerobic exercise. To understand why, we need to review what stress is. People often think of stress as pressure at work, a demanding boss, a sick child or rush-hour traffic. These may be trigger but stress is actually the body reaction to factors such as these. Stress is the fight-or-fight response in the body, mediated by adrenaline and other stress hormones and comprised such physiologic changes as increased heart rate and blood pressure, faster breathing, muscle tension, dilated pupils, dry mouth and increased blood sugar. In other words, stress is the state of increased arousal necessary for an organism to defend itself at a time of danger.
Exercise is the most logical way to dissipate the excess energy. It is what our bodies are trying to do when we pace around or tap our legs and fingers. It is much better to channel it into a more complete form of exercise like a brisk walk, a run, a bike ride, or a game of squash.
Just as we are all capable of mounting up and sustaining a stress reaction, we have also inherited the ability to put our bodies into a state of deep relaxation called the ‘relaxation response’. In this state, all the physiologic events in the stress reaction are reversed. Pulse slows, blood pressure falls, breathing slows and muscles relax.
According to the passage, the major step in controlling stress is Options:Choose the option opposite in meaning to the word(s) or phrase in italics.
The witness averred that she had seen Dosun at the scene of the crime.
Options:From the list of words or group of wordslettered A to D, choose the one that is mostnearest opposite in meaning to the underlined word or group of words and that will, at the same time correctly fill in the gap in the sentence.
I thought that the comments made by the Manager were quite innocuous but the chairman considered them __________
Options:Boxing is sometimes called' the noble art of self defence'. According to some people, boxing appeals to the lowest instincts in the ...11... who have come to watch blood flow and their fellow human suffer Boxers who are medically fit appear in the ...12... The referee sometimes allows the...13... to go on for long so that one of the ...14... is reduced to a human punch bag.It may happen that the boxers are not well ...15... one being much stronger than the other, as a result of which he so much...16... his opponent that he wins ...17... Many boxers have suffered permanent brain...18... in the ...19... of punches that have been thrown at them during their ...20...
Choose the most appropriate option for the gap labelled [...18...] above. Options:Fill in the gap(s) with the most appropriate option from the list following the gap(s).
The development is to be carried to the _____ level?
Options:In the question below choose the option nearest in meaning to the word(s) or phrase Underlined:
Nothing irritates the clerk more, than being assigned miscellaneous duties
Options:Fill each gap with the most appropriate option from the list provided.
If you would do me this favour, I ______ be very grateful?
Options:Fill the blank spaces with the most appropriate of options A-E:
I ….. him before he came into the room.
Options: