abstract: the present study is an attempt to find out cultural exophoric references in iranian high-school elt textbooks and touch stone series to compare the frequency of occurrence of such references in these books. the purpose is to find out which of the series of the books under investigation impose a greater referential burden on efl learners as far as their reading comprehension of the ...

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

abstract since heubners (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages. the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same cen...

sange siyah dam is located two kilometers down the kabod khani village. the environ of ghorrve city in kurdestan province. this is an clay core dam. in this dam instrumentation is performed in three section and consist of electrical piezometers, total pressure cells, settlement cells and so on. the main objective of instrumentation is to control the behavior of dam body and foundation, end else...

the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

a phase-locked loop (pll) based frequency synthesizer is an important circuit that is used in many applications, especially in communication systems such as ethernet receivers, disk drive read/write channels, digital mobile receivers, high-speed memory interfaces, system clock recovery and wireless communication system. other than requiring good signal purity such as low phase noise and low spu...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

this study is an outlook of iranians religious practices and customs in eras such as nasser one. it attempts to answer the main question, "religious practices and ceremonies in the society during naseri ruling" and other subsidiary questions with scientific and historical theories. iran was a traditional and religious community . people abided by their religious practices and duties within reli...

adaptation of the lord of the rings is considered by many to be among the greatest, most successful and at the same time most popular of the above mentioned trend so far. it is my intention to look at the success and popularity of this epic fantasy in the light of the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror context of g. w. bush’s aura. in so doing i aim at bringing into the light the determining fa...