Critical reading
Content
Practical exercises – Types of text
A Types of text
Task 1
Read the following texts and identify the types of text. Then match the texts with the following text types:
- research report
- essay
- textbook
- book review
| A. When a firm faces a downward-sloping demand curve, marginal revenue will be less than average revenue, and may even be negative. But why? If a firm is to sell more per time period, it must lower its price (assuming it does not advertise). This will mean lowering the price not just for the extra units it hopes to sell, but also for those units it would have sold had it not lowered the price. Thus the marginal revenue is the price at which it sells the last unit, minus the loss in revenue it has incurred by reducing the price on those units it could otherwise have sold at the higher price. This can be illustrated with Table 5.8. | |
| B. The overall participation rate of women in the Australian workforce since the end of World War II has increased markedly. The absence of m ale workers during the war ‘brought into the workforce considerable numbers of women who had not been employed before the war broke out’ (Ryan and Conlon 1989, p. 137). However, many women gave up their jobs when the men returned. Their rates of pay compared to men were reduced in the post-war years (Ryan and Conlon 1989, pp. 140-144). Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon provide the following table, which shows that the proportion of women in the manufacturing industry peaked during the war, declined until 1959, and then began to increase gradually. | |
| C. In recent years Ian McEwan’s fiction has been playful and inventive. “Nutshell” (published in 2016) was an audacious restyling of “Hamlet” that featured as its narrator a garrulous, erudite unborn child. “Machines Like Me” (2019) explored the brave new world of artificial intelligence within a counterfactual past. And the novella “The Cockroach” (2019), written as a response to Brexit, repurposed Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to satirise the state of a divided nation. Mr McEwan’s latest novel returns to more traditional fictional territory. This is not to say that “Lessons” is devoid of big ideas and artistic risks. Indeed, in some respects it may be the author’s most ambitious work to date. | |
| D. I am more and more persuaded that man is an unhappy animal, abandoned and forced to find his own way in life. Nature has never known anything like him. He suffers a thousandfold more from his so-called freedom than from his imprisonment in natural existence. Not surprisingly, he often longs to be a flower or some other plant. When you come to a point where you want to live like a plant, fully unconscious, then you have come to despair of humanity. But why shouldn't I exchange places with a flower? I already know what it means to be man, to live in history, have ideals: what else is in it for me? To be a man is, of course, a great thing! |
Task 2
Now try to match the articles above with the sources below:
| The Economist, Culture, September 10, 2022 | |
| Sloman, Economics, Pearson 2015, p.160 | |
| Cioran, On the heights of despair, Chicago, 1992, 51 | |
| https://www.vu.edu.au |