Fms 2007 Daily Study Center

With just about a month left for FMS I think its time we put in that extra bit that could help us sail through FMS. But the tendency to procrastinate is universal!! :: Keeping this in mind I have decided that everything that I am able to learn a…

With just about a month left for FMS I think its time we put in that extra bit that could help us sail through FMS. But the tendency to procrastinate is universal!! Keeping this in mind I have decided that everything that I am able to learn and study in a day I shall post in a single post for that day. It could be words , quant sums , reasoning , RC passages..anything... If others (those having regular net access) do the same we shall soon have repository of material that could help us crack FMS 2007!! Cheers !

All The Best!!

Regards
Tanveer

abrogate:to abolish by authoritative action ;2: to treat as nonexistent abrogating their responsibilities>
acclivity:an ascending slope (as of a hill)
adumbrate:to foreshadow vaguely ;to suggest, disclose, or outline partially adumbrate a plan>
adventitious:coming from another source and not inherent or innate a Federal house without adventitious later additions>; 2:arising or occurring sporadically or in other than the usual location adventitious roots>
ambulatory:of, relating to, or adapted to walking; also : occurring during a walk
2 : moving from place to place;3 : capable of being altered a will is
ambulatory until the testator's death>4 a : able to walk about and not
bedridden ambulatory patients> b : performed on or involving an
ambulatory patient or an outpatient ambulatory medical care>
ambulatory electrocardiogram>

All meanings taken from Meriam Webster dictonary Site
Definition of ambulatory - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

A few basic QA questions to warm up...

Wars and a Man

There's a moment in Virgil's "Aeneid" when the Trojan forces are massed like "a cloudburst wiping out the sun, sweeping over the seas toward land." It's an image that evokes another army, likewise intimidating, although this one's composed chiefly of sedentary men, white-haired and bespectacled. Their numbers, too, are unreckonable - those squadrons of scholars who have, over the centuries, translated the "Aeneid."
Has any book been recast into English more times than this tale of Aeneas' wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire? Probably not, given both the poem's venerability and the relative accessibility of Latin. When you further consider all the partial or complete versions in private manuscript - often the work of old classics teachers, shared with their students - we indeed confront something that looms over us like a cloudburst.
Robert Fagles, the poem's newest translator, comes to the fray well armed. An emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton, he has already translated, with great success, Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey." And his publisher for the "Aeneid," Viking, has accoutered him handsomely, with a clear map, a useful pronunciation glossary, and a harmonious blend of layout and type font and binding.
For all its translations, the "Aeneid" erects sizable obstacles for anybody hoping to render it into satisfying English. Perhaps the most formidable of these is the tale's diminishing narrative drive. Most of what lingers in the reader's memory - the fall of Troy, Dido's passion and ultimate suicide, Aeneas' journey to the Underworld - unfolds in the first six of the poem's 12 books; the epic's second half largely documents a successful military campaign against the Rutulians in Italy.
I've conducted a little poll over the years, asking various fellow English professors to name Aeneas' chief adversary - the warrior Turnus, leader of the Rutulians, who stands in relation to Aeneas as Hector does to Achilles. They frequently can't, which I find reassuring. For who can fault them, given that Turnus is, as epic antagonists go, so blandly magnificent? (Or is it magnificently bland?) He's stalwart, handsome and, when left to his own devices, peaceable. If he's occasionally possessed by blood-lust, this is mostly the gods' doing. When we initially meet him, he's sleeping heavily - until awakened by a messenger of revengeful Juno, who goads him into rage and carnage.
The "Aeneid" is suffused with a fascinating, upending sense that most of what goes gravely wrong on earth isn't imputable to human agency. There's something comforting to Virgil's conception of humanity, in which relatively little malice and unreasonableness and rapacity seem innate to our kind. And there's something unsettling as well - a vision of a world that would be safer and more secure if only the heavens were emptied. (It's a vision perhaps familiar to those of us who sometimes feel we'd be better off if our own gods, whose Mount Olympus is Capitol Hill, would all go away.)

Fagles converts Virgil's hexameters into variable lines, long and flexible. The result is free verse, with the ghost of a hexameter serving as loose armature:Wars and a man I sing - an exile driven on

by Fate,

he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,

destined to reach Lavinian shores and

Italian soil,

yet many blows he took on land and sea

from the gods above. ... The issue of line length poses a fundamental and perhaps an irresolvable dilemma. Between the Latin hexameter and the standard English line for long narrative poems - iambic pentameter - lies an unbridgeable chasm. The Latin line simply contains more information than can reliably be packed into its English counterpart. The translator must then make a choice. Does he go with a long-line approximation of the Latin (at the risk of producing an ungainly English unit that tends to sag in the middle)? Or will he, in allegiance to English poetic traditions, adopt something shorter (at the risk of losing the feel of the expansive original)? It's a question that every major translator of the "Aeneid" - a list that includes John Dryden, C. Day Lewis, Rolfe Humphries and Robert Fitzgerald - has confronted.

Fitzgerald's translation, which appeared in 1983, has long served as my own standard edition, and to read him side by side with Fagles is fascinating. Fitzgerald employs a taut shorter line (iambic pentameter, with many truncations - a meter he subtly loosens and tightens as he goes along), and in moments of great lyrical intensity his version regularly seems tenser, richer. Here is the Trojan horse being hauled into the city:. . . Everyone

Pitched in to get the figure underpinned

With rollers, hempen lines around the neck.

Deadly, pregnant with enemies, the horse

Crawled upward to the breach.
(Fitzgerald)


We breach our own ramparts, fling our

defenses open,

all pitch into the work. Smooth running

rollers

we wheel beneath its hoofs, and heavy

hempen ropes

we bind around its neck, and teeming with

men-at-arms

the huge deadly engine climbs our city

walls ...
(Fagles)


Here is Dido, at wit's end, portrayed just before her suicide:She prayed then to whatever power may

care

In comprehending justice for the grief

Of lovers bound unequally by love.
(Fitzgerald)


And then to any Power above, mindful,

evenhanded,

who watches over lovers bound by unequal

passion,

Dido says her prayers.
(Fagles)


And here - my favorite passage in the poem - is the moment when ever dutiful Aeneas, with his exhausted, despairing father at his side, balances the awesome burdens of past and future:So I resigned myself, picked up my father,

And turned my face toward the mountain

range.
(Fitzgerald)


So I gave way at last and

lifting my father, headed toward the

mountains.
(Fagles)

Yet if the blazing moments belong to Fitzgerald, there's a capaciousness to Fagles's line well suited to this vast story's ebb and flow. Aeneas is a storm-tossed man - the epic opens with shipwreck on the coast of Africa - and Fagles renders the pilgrimage in cadences that are encompassing without feeling cluttered. As Fitzgerald surely would have agreed, the sea has many voices, and this is one of them.
You might say it's Aeneas' peculiar storybook fate to wander the seas for years, in "Odyssey" fashion, only to find landfall on the shores of the "Iliad." In Book 7, when the extended campaign against the Rutulians begins, Aeneas' private self basically drops away, as it must, for his military responsibilities as commander in chief eclipse all else. Inner voices are another casualty of the din of war.
As a literary creation, Aeneas is marvelous for the way this most powerful and influential of warriors seems the least free of men. He is laying the cornerstones for an empire without precedent, which will (a complement to the biblical fiat lux) impose a fiat lex across the earth: Roman notions of law and order will eventually prevail from the Irish Sea to the Caspian, from Russia to Morocco. Yet Aeneas himself evidently has little say in the matter. If left to his own devices, he would contentedly remain with Dido in Africa, where life is sheltered and the pleasures of the flesh are dizzyingly sweet. But his country calls him - which is to say, the gods have other plans.
Virgil openly pays tribute to Homer, in both imagery and incident. (It seems there is nothing, not even the will of the gods, so inescapable as literary convention.) If the "Aeneid" can hardly match the "Iliad" as a portrait of war, in some regards the successor excels the model. The "Aeneid" hauntingly captures the psyche of a weathered soldier who has had enough - but who cannot declare he's had enough until a lasting peace is secured. By the time battered Aeneas reaches the shores of Italy, he's the least bloodthirsty of men, praying his people can cohabit tranquilly with the Rutulians. Down the centuries, the "Aeneid" has doubtless spoken with special poignancy to veteran commanders all over the world, who can read their own lives in an ancient poem composed when bows and arrows were the cutting edge in aerial warfare.

The "Aeneid" contains two significant passages of prophetic outreach, when the present vanishes away and neighboring centuries reveal themselves like sunlit valleys in a clearing fog. The first arises when Ae neas, visiting his father in the Underworld, beholds the ramifying glories of Rome's coming empire. The second occurs when Vulcan forges him a shield on which centuries of triumph are chronicled:He knows nothing of these events but takes

delight

in their likeness, lifting onto his shoulders

now

the fame and fates of all his children's

children.
Virgil also looks backward, reminding us how the Trojans and their city, gleaming on the dawn-struck outskirts of Asia, eventually came to dust. And how even the victorious Greeks came to dust. But Rome - he assures his readers - will never fade.
Virgil was wrong, and it's one of the most gorgeous ironies of the "Aeneid" that while it celebrates the political - the founding of an empire, by the young and potent and brave - as the summit of human achievement, its greater and more durable feat lies elsewhere. The triumph is ultimately literary, of course, and also collective - since it belongs in part to those white-haired translators who have brought such well-seasoned judgments to a timeless tale. Theirs is the prevailing army, among whose ranks Robert Fagles emerges as a new and noble standard-bearer.

Source:'The Aeneid,' by Virgil. Translated by Robert Fagles - Books - Review - New York Times

Some LR problems from "281 Puzzles" file of h_pranav

Regards
Tanveer

last year the FMS paper did contain LR caselets which were lifted straight from the CareerLauncher Material.
So,maybe its worth it to go thru the basic materials once again.
But generally i feel that compared to the other exams like CAT,XAT etc.
FMS is much more of a "feel-good" paper.
Not much is required in terms of preparaion other than increasing speed and attempting a lot more questions.
Good initiative anyway!

abreuvoir
n. gap between stones in masonry; (French) watering place for animals

ab ovo
"from the egg'; from the beginning. ab ovo usque ad mala, 'from the egg to the apples'; from the beginning to the end.

ab initio
'from the beginning'.

abalone
n. ear-shaped marine shellfish, yielding mother-of-pearl; ear- shell.

absquatulate
v.i. jocular, decamp. (someone check up this!)

absterge
v.t. archaic, wipe clean; purify. abstergent, a. cleansing; n. such substance. abstersion, n.
accismus
n. rhetorical device of pretending to refuse.

aceldama
n. field, or scene, of bloodshed

acephalous
a. lacking a head or a leader; lacking the first syllable or foot (of a hexameter). acephalus (pl. -li), n. foetus lacking a head.

achromatopsia
n. colour-blindness, where only white, grey and black are visible.

Source:Dictionary of Difficult Words - A

Regards
Tanveer
Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches
Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nations medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.

Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.
For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits, an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.
So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it. The Association for Women in Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council are among the groups tackling these issues. In just the past two months, conferences have been held at Columbia University and the City University of New York graduate center. Harvard has a yearlong lecture series on Women, Science and Society.
This fall, female scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science.
The reality is there are barriers that women face, said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meetings opening dinner. There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.
Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.
Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.
They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.
And they obsess about what they call the two body problem, the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.
Just having a chance to talk about these issues with others who face them lifts some of the burden, said Marla Geha, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., who attended the Rice meeting. Its even just knowing theres someone else out there going through the same things.
For Princess Imoukhouede, who is working for her doctorate in bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, the Rice conference was helpful because this is a difficult issue to talk about.
There is a perception in science that all things are equal, Ms. Imoukhouede said. But gender actually does matter, and by the same token, race, too.
One issue is negotiating skills, said Daniel R. Ames, a psychologist who teaches at Columbia Universitys business school and who spoke last month at a university-sponsored symposium, The Science of Diversity. Dr. Ames said that when he asks people what worries them about navigating the workplace, men and women give the same answer: How hard should I push? How aggressive should I be? Too little seems ineffective, but too much comes across as brash or unpleasant.
Answering the aggressiveness question correctly can be a key to obtaining the financial resources (like laboratory space or stipends for graduate students) and the social capital (like collaboration and sharing) that are essential for success in science, he said. But, he told his mostly female audience, the band of acceptable behavior for women is narrower than it is for men.
Women who assert themselves may be derogated, he said, and, possibly as a result, women are less likely to recognize negotiating opportunities, and may beapprehensive about negotiating for resources when opportunities arise. That is a problem, he said, because even small differences in resources can accumulate over a career to lead to significant differences in outcomes.
For example, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said.
Another speaker at the Columbia conference, Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University, said clear and explicit evaluation criteria are essential.

Even today, Dr. Heilman said, the idea that women are somehow unsuited to science is widespread and tenacious. Because people judge others in terms of these unconscious prejudices, she said, the same behavior that would suggest a man is collaborative, judicious or flexible would mark a woman as needy, timid or flighty.

And because science is still widely viewed as a male arena, she said, a woman who succeeds may be viewed as selfish, manipulative, bitter, untrustworthy, conniving and cold.
Women in science are in a double bind, Dr. Heilman said. When not clearly successful, they are presumed to be incompetent. When they are successful, they are not liked.
Women do better, she said, in environments where they are judged on grants obtained, prizes won, findings cited by other experts, or other explicit criteria, rather than on whether they are, say, cutting edge. There has to be very little room for ambiguity, Dr. Heilman said. Otherwise, expectations swoop in to fill the vacuum.
The importance of mentors is another theme that runs through these sessions. In her keynote speech at the Rice conference, Deb Niemeier, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Davis, mentioned several occasions when timely intervention from a thesis adviser, department chairman or other mentor turned things around for her.
Joan Steitz, a professor of molecular biophysics at Yale and a member of the academys expert panel, said the same thing in one of the Harvard lectures this month. It is crucial to have someone up your sleeve who will save you, Dr. Steitz said.
But there is evidence that women do not receive this support to the degree men do.
Dr. Steitz cited a study of letters of recommendation written for men and women seeking academic appointments. Though all the applicants were successful, she said, and though the letters were written by men and women, the study found that the applicants personal life was mentioned six times more often if the letter was about a woman.
Also, Dr. Steitz said, For women, the things that were talked about more frequently were how well they were trained, what good teachers they were and how well their applications were put together. When the subject of the letter was male, she said, the big topics were research skills and success in the lab.
Ever since I read this paper and I sit down to write a letter of recommendation, Dr. Steitz said, I think, Oh, have I fallen into this trap?
If mentors dont present themselves, women may have to create them, Dr. Steitz said.
She cited Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists (Yale University Press, 2006), a book by Ellen Daniell, a former assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the book Dr. Daniell describes a group of female scientists who have been meeting regularly for more than 20 years to talk about their professional triumphs and travails, turning themselves into mentors and role models for one other.
A young woman raised another question that rarely troubles men. When I talk about the work in my lab, she asked, should I say I or we?
Dr. Richards-Kortum suggested this formula: Weve talked about it in our lab and I think... She added, if you say we too much it can be misinterpreted. And then there was the two-body problem.
In physics, the two-body problem is a matter of calculating the paths of objects in orbit around each other. For women in science, it is a matter of landing a job not just for yourself but for your partner, and then balancing the demands of children and the laboratory.
Here the advice is less clear-cut.
For example, when women at the Rice meeting asked about the best time to tell a prospective boss that a trailing spouse will also need an academic job, they heard answers ranging from as soon as possible to only after you have a firm job offer.
Children add even more complexities.
I am pregnant and during my interview process I will be visibly pregnant, said Caroline Nam-Laufer, a postdoctoral chemical engineer at the University of Delaware. I want to put myself forth so that my qualifications come through and not my belly.
Dr. Niemeier, who acquired her own two-body problem recently when she began a relationship with a woman who has two children, suggested responding to questions about children with, Could you tell me how that factors into your evaluation? or, Right now, I am looking for the best job I can get.
Go into it thinking you are the cream of the crop, she reminded them.
But the speakers had little advice they could offer with confidence that it would fit every woman.
Dr. Richards-Kortum won admiring gasps when she disclosed she is a mother of four who successfully interviewed for a tenured position while visibly pregnant. She faced the process with less trepidation, she said, once she realized it was O.K. with me if I had kids and didnt get tenure, but it would not be O.K. with me if I got tenure and didnt have kids.
Dr. Niemeier also advised the group to watch for signs that a university might not be ready to embrace successful female scientists. When she was job-hunting, she said, she was advised, if you are the first woman in the department, walk away. You can have other jobs.
I dont necessarily agree with that advice, she said. But she didnt necessarily disagree with it either.
Still, many of the women involved in these efforts say things have improved a lot, and continue to get better.

Source: Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches - New York Times

These questions were posted by Gaurav on his thread ..Long time Back...Cant claim to have solved all the questions..Am still sitting in office!!!:-)

Regards
Tanveer

thanks for the liast of words . but r u sure webster's dictionary is the bench mark or is it oxford??/

vrinda sharma Says
thanks for the liast of words . but r u sure webster's dictionary is the bench mark or is it oxford??/


Well..The benchmark is "FMS examiners panel"... . OXFORD or WEBSTERS should be fine.


Regards
Tanveer

Great initiative Tanveer... Keep posting!! 😃 Thanks!!

Thats a wonderful effort Tanveer. Thanks.
I'll try if i could contribute sth to this thread too..

Ritu

The term stuttering is most commonly associated with involuntary sound repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by stutterers as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels. Much of what constitutes "stuttering" cannot be observed by the listener; this includes such things as sound and word fears, situational fears, anxiety, tension, self-pity, stress, shame, and a feeling of "loss of control" during speech. The emotional state of the individual who stutters in response to the stuttering often constitutes the most difficult aspect of the disorder. The term "stuttering", as popularly used, covers a wide spectrum of severity: it may encompass individuals with barely perceptible impediments, for whom the disorder is largely cosmetic, as well as others with extremely severe symptoms, for whom the problem can effectively prevent most oral communication.
Stuttering is generally not a problem with the physical production of speech sounds (see Voice disorders) or putting thoughts into words (see Dyslexia, Cluttering). Despite popular perceptions to the contrary, stuttering does not affect and has no bearing on intelligence. Apart from their speech impairment, people who stutter are generally normal. Anxiety, low confidence, nervousness, and stress therefore do not cause stuttering, although they are very often the result of living with a highly stigmatized disability.
The disorder is also variable, which means that in certain situations, such as talking on the telephone, the stuttering might be more severe or less, depending on the anxiety level connected with that activity. In other situations, such as singing (as with country music star Mel Tillis or pop singer Gareth Gates) or speaking alone (or reading from a script, as with actor James Earl Jones), fluency improves. (It is thought that speech production in these situations, as opposed to normal spontaneous speech, may involve a different neurological function.) Some very mild stutterers, such as Bob Newhart, have used the disorder to their advantage, although more severe stutterers very often face serious hurdles in their social and professional lives. Although the exact etiology of stuttering is unknown, both genetics and neurophysiology are thought to contribute. Although there are many treatments and speech therapy techniques available that may help increase fluency in some stutterers, there is essentially no "cure" for the disorder at present.

The prevalence of stuttering in preschool children is about 2.5%, that is, about 1 young child in 40 now stutters. The incidence is about 5%, or 1 in 20 children stutter at some point in childhood.26
About 1% of adults stutter. The figure found in a recent study was 0.73%, or about one in 135 adults.27 About 80% of adult stutterers are men and about 20% are women.28
Studies in years past claimed that some countries had higher or lower rates of stuttering, or that some cultures had no stutterers at all. These studies are generally discounted now, although there are likely more adult stutterers in countries with less speech therapy.

Brain scans of adult stutterers have found several neurological abnormalities:
  1. During speech adult stutterers have more activity in their right hemispheres, which is associated with emotions, than in their left hemispheres, which is associated with speech. Non-stutterers have more left-hemisphere activity during speech. It is unknown whether this abnormal hemispheric dominance results from something wrong with stutterers' left-hemisphere speech areas, with right-hemisphere area unsuited for speech taking over speech tasks; or whether the unusual right-hemisphere activity is related to fears, anxieties, or other emotions stutterers associate with speech.
  2. During speech, adult stutterers have central auditory processing underactivity. One study suggested that stutterers may have an inability to integrate auditory and somatic processing, i.e., comparing how they hear their voices and how they feel their muscles moving.36
  3. A brain scan study examined the planum temporale (PT), an anatomical feature in the auditory temporal brain region. Typically people have a larger PT on the left side of their brains, and smaller PT the right side (leftward asymmetry). A brain scan study found that stutterers' right PT is larger than their left PT (rightward asymmetry).37
  4. Adult stutterers have overactivity in the left caudate nucleus speech motor control area. Because stuttering is primarily overtense, overstimulated respiration, vocal folds, and articulation (lips, jaw, and tongue) muscles, it should be no surprise that the brain area that controls these muscles is overactive. citation needed]
No brain scan studies have been done of stuttering children. It is unknown whether stuttering children have neurological abnormalities.
Another prominent view is that stuttering is caused by neural synchronization problems in the brain. Recent research indicates that stuttering may be correlated with disrupted fibers between the speech area and language planning area, both in the left hemisphere of the brain. Such a disruption could potentially be due to early brain damage or to a genetic defect.
The first brain imaging studies in stuttering were done on two subjects using SPECT scanning before and after the administration of haloperidol. The researchers found that the subjects with stuttering had less blood flow in the Broca's and Wernicke's area and associated this with dysfluency. They found that haloperidol not only reduced stuttering but reversed this functional abnormality. Numerous PET and functional MRI studies have presented data that is in agreement with this first study.
Volumetric MRI studies have found that portions of the Broca's and Wernicke's areas are smaller in people who stutter and this corrolates well with the hypometabolism in these two brain regions. New forms of structural MRI have found that there is a disconnection in white matter fiber tracts in the left hemisphere and greater numbers of white matter fiber tracts in the right hemisphere.
In certain situations, such as talking on the telephone, stuttering might increase, or it might decrease, depending on the anxiety level connected with that activity.
Under stress, people's voices change. They tense their speech-production muscles, increasing their vocal pitch. They try to talk faster. They repeat words or phrases. They add interjections, also known as "filler words", such as "uh." These are normal dysfluencies. A study found that under stress, non-stutterers went from 0% to 4% dysfluencies, for the simple task of saying colors. Stutterers went from 1% to 9%.38
Stuttering reduces stress 10%, as measured by systolic blood pressure.39 But stuttering causes stress in listeners.40 Stuttering appears to reduce stress temporarily, but then cause stress, creating a cyclical pattern in which the stutterer stutters on the first syllable of the first word, then says the rest of the word and several more words fluently, then stutters again, then says a few more words fluently, and so on.
When stuttering, stutterers will often use nonsense syllables or less-appropriate (but easier to say) words to ease into the flow of speech. Stutterers also may use various personal tricks to overcome stuttering or blocks at the beginning of a sentence, after which their fluency can resume. Finger-tapping or head-scratching are two common examples of tricks, which are usually idiosyncratic and may look unusual to the listener. In addition to word substitution or the use of filled pauses, stutterers may also use starter devices to help them ease into fluency. A common practice is the timing of words with a rhythmic movement or other event. For instance, stutterers might snap their fingers as a starter device at the beginning of speech. These devices usually do work, but only for a short amount of time. Often a person who stutters will do something at some point to avoid, postpone, or disguise a stutter and, by coincidence, will not stutter. The stutterer then makes a cause-effect connection between that new behavior and the release of the stuttering, and the behavior becomes a habit. 4
As stutterers often resort to word substitution in order to avoid stuttering, some develop an entire vocabulary of easy-to-pronounce words in order to maintain fluent speechsometimes so well that no one, not even their spouses or friends, know that they have a stutter. Stutterers who successfully use this method are called "covert stutterers" or "closet stutterers". While they do not actually stutter in speech they nevertheless suffer greatly from their speech disorder. The extra effort it takes to scan ahead for feared words or sounds is stressful, and the replacement word is usually not as adequate a choice as the stutterer originally intended. Famously, some stutterers drastically limit their options when dealing with employees at given establishments; only eating cheeseburgers at fast-food restaurants, ordering toppings they do not like on pizzas, or getting a style of haircut they do not want as a by-product of their inability to pronounce certain words. Some stutterers have even changed their own given name because it contains a difficult-to-pronounce sound and frequently leads to embarrassing situations.
Although this action may appear unusual or unreasoned to a fluent speaker, to a stutterer they come as second nature: due to the embarrassment and fear associated with speaking, many stutterers will wish to hide their stutter from listeners. This is the prime reason for avoidance.
When the behaviors of a stutter are infrequent, brief, and are not accompanied by substantial avoidance behavior, the stutter is usually classified as a mild or a non-chronic stutter. Non-chronic stuttering is often called "situational stuttering" because the afflicted person generally has difficulty speaking only in isolated situationsusually during public speaking or other stressful activitiesand outside of these situations the person generally does not stutter. When the behaviors are frequent, long in duration, or when there are visible signs of struggle and avoidance behavior, the stutter is classified as a severe or chronic stutter. Unlike mild or situational stuttering, chronic stuttering is present in most situations, but can be either exacerbated or eased depending on different conditions (see Positive conditions). Severe stutters often, but not always, are accompanied by strong feelings and emotions in reaction to the problem such as anxiety, shame, fear, self-hatred, etc. This is usually less present in mild stutterers and serves as another criteria by which to define stutters as mild or severe. Another way of discerning between the two severities is by percentage of disfluency per 100 words. When a speaker experiences disfluencies at a rate around 10%, they usually have a mild stutter, while 15% or more is usually indicative of a severe stutter.2 In addition to the disfluency, many people who stutter display secondary motor behaviors. Observers often notice muscles tensing up, facial and neck tics, excessive eye blinking, and lip and tongue tremors. In extreme cases entire body movements may accompany stuttering. Most common with stutterers is the inability to maintain eye contact with the listener, which in many cultures may hamper the growth of personal or professional relationships.
Stuttering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted twice by mistake

DEC 21 RC Passage coming soon ...

..like IIFT results!!:-)
Posted twice by mistake
DEC 21 RC Passage coming soon ...
..like IIFT results!!:-)


Hehe don't you say that now... IIFT's 'Coming Soon' ain't soon enough lol

I Dunno if the Test pressures have increased or PG has really robbed a dozen odd servers....but this obsession thing with Studies for Entrances is too much.....
Relax and smell the Valium for a while

Good Luck and Happy Results to y'all!!!

--
A One Liner from an ex-sane PGite

Hi Tanveer,
I was solving quant ques. posted by you.I wonder if you can post the answers key too.
Thanks
Bhupal

Great Initiative, Tanveer. Keep up the good work.
Was waiting for something like this to come up
Thanx a lot!!!