MEANINGS…

1. MEANINGS… • DENOTATION: • The dictionary definition of a word • SUN: The star around which the earth and the other planets of the solar system revolve. • CONNOTATION: • The associations we have with a word • All the things it suggests • SUN: Happiness, warmth, life, etc.

2. CONTEXT • The CONTEXT puts constraints on a word’s connotations: • ‘BAR’ = chocolate, piece of iron, pub, a block of gold, etc • ‘I went into the bar and bought a drink’

3. ‘I went into the bar and bought a drink’ • In this case, it is clearly a pub. • How does the context help you understand its meaning?

4. Again, you could argue that that is just like pre-internet politics. Political party meetings were always dominated by people who happened to have the time to get to them and by people who were more committed and more angry than the average voter. This is exactly the point. In the old days, nobody really thought constituency party meetings were representative of the country at large. A party which wanted to win power had to search out and try to convert the others. The danger is that we forget that old lesson, and naively think of the internet and the bloggers as the only voice of the people. Old media – television, radio, newspapers and even meetings – all remain essential. This is not a call to ignore the net or stop using the excellent research tools online. But we need to avoid easy hype. Most people are not cyber-citizens; they are living real, complicated lives in the real world. And that’s where politicians should be too – rather than trying to surf off down the superhighway. • How does the context of lines 43 – 55 help you to understand what the writer means by ‘technological democracy’ (line 44)? 3U Three points Two words + bits of context

5. TONE • The writer establishes her or his tone by means of word choice, imagery, symbolism or a combination of all three. • When answering about TONE, you usually have to identify the tone AND show which bits of the text help show this tone.

6. (b) Identify the tone of lines 35 – 38 and explain how it has been created. 2 A So such journalists find very attractive any suggestion that all women are, deep down, dying to return to older traditions of social behaviour. This may explain why the media fell so comprehensively last year for a young Canadian woman who argued that women still really, under all that independence, expect men to invite them on “dates” and to pay for them, and are disappointed when such formalities are not on offer. How charming! How traditional! How unlike those brazen British hussies who ask men out themselves and hand over their own hard-earned cash for their drinks!

7. Show how the tone of lines 64 – 71 makes clear the negative side of ‘the computer age’. 2A • The uncomfortable truth is that for most of us the computer has become as much a tyrant as a tool. Overwhelmed by e-mails, we feel we must deal with them immediately and on the spot. Lured by the fascination of the internet, we surf constantly, often to little purpose. Fathers slink away from the dinner-table to sort out unfinished business. Children sneak off to play their interminable games or talk to strangers in chat-rooms about which their parents know nothing. Even the television, around which families used to gather, is being replaced by the all-purpose computer screen, somewhere in another room.

8. “We need immigrants. We cannot grow the necessary skills fast enough to fill the gap sites. We need people with energy and commitment and motivation, three characteristics commonly found among those whose circumstances prompt them to make huge sacrifices to find a new life” • How does the sentence structure help clarify the writer’s view on immigrants?

9. “Its old residential core, sheltering in the approaches to its Tower of London fortress, has made the transition into the world’s busiest banking centre. Its market halls and power stations have become art galleries and piazzas. Its simple terraced streets, built for theclerks of the Great Western Railway in Southall, have become home to the largest Sikh community outside India • How does the sentence structure help clarify the extent of the change?