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, ...

abstract the purpose of this study was to find out the effect of applying the principles of group-dynamic assessment (g-da) on learning of conditional structures in english by iranian efl learners at the intermediate level, which according to the formal educational system in iran, includes students who are in their second year of studying in high schools of koohdasht city. this study was a qua...

increasing academic and professional language demands around the world are not a deniable fact. the purpose of this study was to investigate english language needs and communication needs of the chemistry students at master and ph.d. levels at the iranian universities. in this research, different methods were used including un-structured interview, structured interview, and two sets of question...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

‏‎‏‎utopia has, for four centuries, accompanied that hope of progress and that striving for betterment. it now straggles against a widespread sense that this has been an illusion, or an impossible dream. the utopian idea can never entirely disappear, but utopia as a form of the social imagination has clearly weakened. if it cannot instill its vision in the public consciousness, the consequences...

assigning premium to the insurance contract in iran mostly has based on some old rules have been authorized by government, in such a situation predicting premium by analyzing database and it’s characteristics will be definitely such a big mistake. therefore the most beneficial information one can gathered from these data is the amount of loss happens during one contract to predicting insurance ...

this thesis attempts to study the representations of the third-world intellectuals in three fictional works by the british-educated trinidadian nobel-winner v. s. naipaul: the mimic men, a bend in the river, and magic seeds. the first one recounts the story of ralph singh’s sense of alienation, his experiences as a colonial politician, and his struggle to give order to his disorderly world thro...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

writing as a productive skill requires practice in the basic sub-skills of vocabulary and grammar. in fact, grammar has been viewed as the core of programs in writing classes to help the students put the elements of sentence together and combine sentences of specific lengths to come up with an error-free work of art. conceptualizing l2 writing in this way introduces writing as a product and enc...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...