It is surprising how many people still believe that advertising has little or no influence on what they buy. It is more surprising still when these same people (1) Selectdivulgerevealadmitdeclare to using a particular brand of, say, washing powder, toothpaste or cigarettes, and say they wouldn’t change if you paid them – even after they’ve been shown that another brand is either just the same, better or cheaper. The fact is, people (2) Selectbelievepersuadeconfesscredit themselves that they have never consciously made a deliberate decision to buy a product based on an advertisement they have seen. They may, however, own up to doing so when they come to buy a product they have never owned before and shop around for the best (3) Selectmoneysavingpackagedeal .

But there’s no (4) Selectescapinggettingbreakinggoingaway from ads. They’re everywhere, and they’re designed very cleverly and carefully to play on your emotions. And it works: you remember the ads that make you laugh, or feel sad, or simply annoy you. Often you find yourself buying something simply – you tell yourself- to try it out, but how did this brand of this product get into your head? Another reason for supposing advertising works is the question: why would so many hard-headed business people spend so much money on something that didn’t?

Many Utopias have been dreamed up through the ages. From Plato’s Republic to Thomas More’s Utopia and beyond, serious thinkers have (1) Selectseendreamtenvisionedidealised societies where people live in peace and harmony. Most of these imaginary worlds have things in common: everybody is equal and plays a part in the running of the society; nobody goes without the (2) Selectneedswantsingredientsessentials of life; people live mostly off the land; often there is no money, and so on. Another thing they have in common is that, to the average person, they appear distasteful or unworkable since they do not take into account ordinary human nature or feelings.

Architects have got in on the act, too. After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren drew up plans for a (3) Selectredecorationrearrangementreconstructionrecomposition of the whole city, including precise street widths. And in the 20th century there was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in which, if you weren’t in a car or didn’t have one, life would have been a nightmare.

Also in the 20th century; another famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, dreamed up a perfect city that got no further than the drawing-board. Wright believed that what was wrong with modern cities was, in his words, rent. Ideas, land, even money itself, had to be paid for. He saw this as a form of slavery and believed that modern city dwellers had no sense of themselves as productive individuals. Thus, Wright’s city was to be made up of numerous individual homesteads, and the houses themselves were to be simple, functional and in (4) Selectcontactharmonypeacecommunity with the environment. Everyone would own enough land to grow food for himself and his family. No outsiders would be allowed to come between the citizen and what he produced, or to (5) Selectusurprobexploitcorrupt both for money. Goods and services would all be exchanged, not bought and sold for profit.

Computer viruses have been a (1)Selectfactthreatrealitytheoryof life at least since the 1980s, if not before. They can cause companies to lose hours of working time and they can also spread panic among computer users everywhere. There are, however, several (2)Selectdistinctprecisedistinguishedisolatedtypes of computer infection – all loosely referred to as viruses – and they each work in a slightly different way. A particularly nasty one is the wonn, which is a program designed to sneak its way into an entire computer network, and reproduce itself over and over again. Then there is the Trojan, which strictly (3)Selectsayingtellingtalkingspeakingisn’t a virus, but a piece of software that appears to do one thing, but actually does something malicious instead. When the (4)Selectincredulousunsuspectingscepticalignorantoperator introduces it into the computer, the alien program will take over the machine. With Trojans you have to be particularly careful because they can often be introduced by way of a message advertising an anti-virus product.

So what motivates someone to inLroduce a virus into the computer systems of innocent victims? Perhaps it’s simply the desire to prove that it can be done. Or because it gives the kind of pleasure you get from solving a difficult problem – nowadays people protect their computers with all sorts of security software, so it takes considerable (5)Selectqualificationscouragecouragegiftto break through all the defences and introduce a virus.

In any given population, about ten percent of the people are left-handed and this figure remains relatively (1)Selectevencontinualsimilarstableover time. So-called “handedness” (2)Selecthappensisrunsoccursin families, but what causes it and why the proportion of left-handed to right-handed people is a constant are still a mystery.

One thing we do know is that hand dominance is related to brain asymmetry; and it seems to be generally agreed that the human brain is profoundly asymmetric, and that understanding how this works will tell us much about who we are and how our brains work. Brain (3)Selectfunctionmemorysizecapacityis distributed into the left and right hemispheres, and this is crucial for understanding language, thought, memory, and perhaps even creativity. For right-handed people, language activity is mainly on the left side. Many leftbanders also have left-side language dominance, but a (4)Selectmaximumsuggestivesignificantcountablenumber may have language either more evenly distributed in both hemispheres or else predominantly on the right side of the brain.

Because left-handedness is seen as a key to the complex anatomy of the brain, scientists are (5)Selectresearchingsearchingdetectinginquiringfor links to other conditions, including immune disorders, learning disabilities, and reduced life expectancy.

It’s a risky, not to say foolhardy, business predicting the future, but some (1) Selectlocalnewtypicalglobal trends are so large they are impossible to ignore and the future becomes a little less difficult to see. (2) SelectPointersIndicatorsSignpostsPremonition of what the future might be like for the natural environment include population (3)Selectdevelopmentgrowthrisesexplosion , acts  of environmental vandalism such as deforestation, global warming, and pollution.

Since the 1960s, the human population has roughly doubled and it is likely to rise by another third by 2030. This will of course lead to increased demands for food, water, energy, and space to live, necessarily putting us in competition with other species – and, if the past is anything to go by – with obvious results.
Humans already use 40% of the world’s primary production (energy) and this is bound to increase, with serious consequences for nature. We are fast losing overall biodiversity, including micro-organisms in the soil and sea, not to mention both tropical and temperate forests, which are (4) Selectcrucialfavorabledecisiveeffective to maintaining productive soils, clean water, climate regulation, and resistance to disease. It seems we take these things for granted and governments do not appear to factor them in when making decisions that affect the environment.

One prediction that has been made is that, in the UK at least, warming and the loss of (5) Selectunusualrareuncommonhuman habitats could lead to more continental species coming to live here, and that in towns and cities, we will have more species that have adapted to urban life and living alongside humans.

Most of us (1) Selectdemandlookclaimdeserve to have, or like to think we have, a sense of humor. It makes us better company and is an effective way of dealing with the various annoyances and frustrations that life brings, whether (2) Selectcausedbroughtmadeeffected by people or by circumstances. We assume that it gives us the ability to laugh at ourselves, even when others make (3)Selectjokeconversationfunentertainment of us. Now, what is the difference between humor and satire, and is it true, as many people seem to think, that humorists are on the whole optimistic and sympathetic, while satirists are cynical and negative? I will be taking two writers – Henry Fielding, a writer of comedy, and Jonathan Swift, a satirist – to examine what the differences might be and how much a comic or satiric view of things is a matter of character and temperament, and to see how much the lives these two men led coincided with their respective visions. However, first I’d like to put (4) Selectupindownforwarda theory of sorts that would seem to reverse the general idea that humor is a positive and satire a negative view of the world. Humor is a way of accepting things as they are. Confronted with human stupidity, greed, vice, and so on, you shrug your shoulders, laugh, and carry on. After all, there is nothing to be done. Human nature is unchanging and we will never reform and improve ourselves. Satirists, on the other hand, begin with the idea that making fun of the follies of man is a very (5) Selecthandyeffectivedecentlogicalway of reforming them. Surely, in believing this they, rather than the humorists, are the optimists, however angry they may be.