the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

heteropoly acids (hpa) and their salts have advantages as catalysts which make them both economically and environmentally attractive, strong br?nsted acidity, exhibiting fast reversible multi-electron redox transformations under rather mild conditions, very high solubility in polar solvents, fairly high thermal stability in the solid states, and efficient oxidizing ability, so that they are imp...

1. to determine whether difference in birth body mass influenced growth performance in pipistrellus kuhlii we studied a total of 12 captive-born neonates. bats were assigned to two body mass groups: light birth body mass (lbw: 0.89 ± 0.05, n=8) and heavy birth body mass (hbw: 1.35 ± 0.08, n=4). heavier body mass at birth was associated with rapid postnatal growth (body mass and forearm length) ...

the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

armenias geopolitics and its historical experience have had a determining impact on the character of its foreign policy .present-day armenia is a small, landlocked country with _11,620 square miles area armenias landlocked nature makes it dependent on the benevolence of its neighbors for access to the outside world a fact that gives it a sense of isolation and vulnerability. as it was indic...

abstract u.s. attack to afghanistan after 9/11 provided opportunities for us who tried to become the dominant power after collapse of ussr and bipolar world. thinkers like fukuyama believed american liberal democrats thought would be universally accepted without resistances. liberal democracy is the best and final model of governance; in this regard, united state has moral responsibilities for...

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...

the construct of self-efficacy has received increasing attention in research over the past two decades. many studies have been carried out 1.3 significance of the study this study has pedagogical implications since improving students’ self- efficacy and autonomy is important for promoting actual performance on classroom academic tasks. in academic settings, it has been shown that self-effi...