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1) Parallelism in sentences – exercise: Discuss the following lists with your partner and correct any mistakes you
will find. Keep in mind that one of the sentences is correct!
a) For the class, he had to read two books, write an essay and a short exercise.
b) We had to order new tools, additional light bulbs, and make sure everything goes according to schedule.
c) He wanted me to finish the report, the accounting book, and to write to the CEO that we have completed the
project.
d) The deadline was approaching so I worked longer shifts, finished the project, and handed it in according to the
schedule.
e) The favorite books of my childhood were The Hobbit, Pippi Longstocking, Krása nesmírná.
f) He only brought his clothes, a shoe, a pencil into the class, and then proceeded to fall asleep behind the desk.
g) I decided I have to do the following: buy new shoes, get some certificate in English, a new haircut, and follow my
dreams.
2) Linking Words Exercise
1) Polls show that Tony Blair is the most popular Prime Minister this century. ______________ , there are even
members of his own party who are uneasy with his approach.
In particular However For instance
2) There are some slight variations in temperature, but ________________ 26 to 27ºC should be expected.
Consequently otherwise as a rule
3) The two main Channel Islands, ________________ Jersey and Guernsey, are much closer to France than to
England.
For example namely in particular
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4) It was announced that nurses' working hours would be increased by 25%. ______________ , even fewer trainee
nurses are expected to join the profession.
As a result So that Likewise
5) Sales of CDs have experienced a small but steady fall over the past 12 months. _____________ , vinyl records have
seen an increase in their share of the market, up to 1.7%.
Above all Correspondingly In contrast
6) The Vice Chancellor explained that in light of the current financial climate and because of unexpected bad debts, it
would be necessary to peg salary levels at their current level for all grades of staff. ______________ , no-one was
getting a pay rise.
Nevertheless In other words Similarly
7) It is clear, therefore, that the situation in Brazil will improve only slowly. ______________ the economic problems
being experienced in Japan, the outlook is slightly more optimistic.
Furthermore In comparison With reference to
8) In order to try to reduce car use in the inner cities, the government has announced new restrictions on company
parking spaces and ______________ , a new tax on individual car use.
As well as in addition in the same way
9) Essays must be handed in by the deadline, ______________ they will not be marked.
Obviously otherwise as a result
10) ______________ it has been shown that fractures can occur at even relatively low pressures, the use of the
material should not be completely discounted.
Nevertheless Because Even though
ACADEMIC TEXTS
1) Read the following paragraph from a CS PhD thesis. What is the paragraph’s function? Where do you think
you can find it in the thesis?
2) Go through the paragraph again and think about the individual sentences. What is their function in the
text (i.e. to introduce an idea, to expand on a previous notion, etc.)?
3) Read the text one more time and then highlight all words or phrases that help connect the sentences
together.
Real-time distributed groupware systems are computer applications that allow people to work together at the same
time, but from different places. These systems are becoming more common as network connectivity increases and
organizations move towards mobile computing, telecommuting, and distributed work teams. Unfortunately,
groupware has usability problems: when compared with working face-to-face, collaboration through groupware
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seems clumsy, stilted, and artificial. When people use a groupware system, they often cannot interact in the ways
that they do in front of a whiteboard or over a table. Even simple things like pointing to an object or watching
another person work are often difficult or impossible in groupware.
(Adapted from: Carl Gutwin and Saul Greenberg. A Framework of Awareness for Small Groups in Shared-Workspace Groupware
http://www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin/1999/WA-theory/Theory-submitted-TR.html)
The following sentences compose the paragraph that directly follows the one above. Try to put them into
the correct order. Focus on words or phrases that make it easier for you to determine the organization of
the paragraph.
A Awareness is taken for granted in everyday face-to-face environments, but when the setting changes to
distributed groupware, many of the normal cues and information sources that people use to maintain awareness are
gone.
B It is a simple fact that awareness is an important part of collaboration.
C One of the problems with current groupware systems is that they make it hard for people to stay aware of
one another.
D Groupware systems provide only a fraction of the information about other people that is available in a faceto-face
situation, and as a result, interactions and behaviors that were once effortless can become stilted and
formal.
E One has only to watch a group activity to see people checking up, taking notice, and keeping track of others,
whether over a jigsaw puzzle, in front of a chalkboard, or on a basketball court.
4) Look at the organization of the paragraph and discuss it with your colleague(s). Why is it organized that way?
5) Now that you have the first two paragraphs of the introduction, what do you think will be in the third one?
Read the following abstract and identify its parts.
(1) Personalized Web applications automatically adapted for different clients and user preferences gain more
importance. (2) Still there are barely technologies to compensate the additional effort of creating, maintaining and
publishing such Web content. (3) To address this problem, this paper introduces a declarative, component-based
approach for adaptive, dynamic Web documents on the basis of XML-technology. (4) Adaptive Web components on
different abstraction levels are defined in order to support effective Web page authorizing and generation. (5)
Hierarchical document components playing a specific semantic role are also defined. (6) The hyperlink view for
defining typed links is spanned over all component layers. (7) Beside the issue of both implementation artifacts and
higher level concepts, the model also allows to define adaptive behavior of components in a fine-granular way. (8) As
a further benefit the support for ubiquitous collaboration via component annotations is introduced. (9) Finally, the
stepwise pipeline-based process of document generation is introduced and performance issues are sketched.