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, ...

this exploratory study aimed to investigate a possible relationship between learners’ beliefs about language learning and one of their personality traits; that is,locus of control (loc). both variables, beliefs and locus of control, are assumed to influence the language learning process. the internal control index (ici) and the beliefs about language learning inventory (balli) were administered...

according to webster and wind (1972) and anderson et al (1987), “organizational buying is a complex process and involves many people from different functional areas, multiple goals and potentially conflicting decision criteria. moreover, the customers of today are also more knowledgeable and selective when making their purchasing decisions. since a key to organizational survival is the retentio...

in this thesis, phosphorus ylides [phbppy], [no2bppy] and [brbppy] have been synthesized through the formation of phosphonium salt and dihydrogenation, followed by the reaction of pd(oac)2 and the orthopalladated dinuclear complexes [pd(?-cl)(phbppy)]2, [pd(?-cl)(no2bppy)]2 and [pd(?-cl)(brbppy)]2 have been produced. the reaction of dinuclear complexes and bidentate ligands [l = bipy (2,2-bipyr...

abstract the present study investigated the effects of task types and involvement load hypothesis on incidental learning of 10 target words (tws) in junior high schools (jhss) in givi, ardabil. the tasks deployed in this study were two input-based tasks (reading plus dictionary use with an involvement index of 3, and reading plus gap-fill task with an involvement index of 2), and one output-ba...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

abstract this study set out to compare the effect of modality of presentation (subtitled vs. auditory) in the comprehension of verbal content of documentary films among iranian efl students. to this end, (30 male 30 female) students were chosen from two schools. after their homogeneity was established, the students attended the listening sessions to watch five documentary films over t...

abstract this study examines the relationship between reading anxiety and difficulty of texts as well as the relationship between reading anxiety and students perceived difficulty of the texts. since difficulty is a relative concept, i limited its definition by sticking to the readability formula. we also took students perceived difficulty levels into account. therefore, in the present study, ...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching meta cognitive strategies on iranian intermediate efl students speaking proficiency. in this study the researcher has employed metacognitive strategies taken from brown (2000) to teach speaking strategies to number of participants. the participants were intermediate students of shokouh language institute; they were divided into an ...

this study investigated the effects of three kinds of gloss conditions, that is traditional non-call marginal gloss, audio gloss, and extended audio gloss, on reading comprehension and vocabulary gain of iranian upper- intermediate efl learners. to this end, three experimental and one control groups, each comprising 15 participants, took part in the current study. in order to ensure that the pa...