Word: verb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...read outside the lines, so to speak? Well, yes and no. E-Rater "learns" what constitutes good and bad answers from a sample of pregraded essays. Using that information, it breaks the essay down to its syntax, organization and content. The software checks basics like subject-verb agreement as well as recognizes words, phrases and sentence structures that are likely to be found in high-scoring essays. For example, an essay on Clinton's impeachment trial that includes terms like DNA and rule of law is likely to garner a top grade...
That won't reassure traditionalists, who argue that writing simply can't be reduced to rigid adjective plus subject plus verb formulations. "This is all part of a long-term approach to mind as machine," says David Schaafsma, professor of English education at Teachers College of Columbia University. "Writing is a human act, with aesthetic dimensions that computers can only begin to understand." The Kaplan course, a leader in test prep, has taken a more pragmatic approach: it has issued a list of strategies for "the age of the computerized essay." One of its tips: use transitional phrases like "therefore...
What I mean is that a professional football game is the mutation of inert muscle (noun) into pure historicized act (verb), framed in a matrix ("gridiron") of time and space. At the precise pencil-point of time, the quarterback's cogito presses urgently upon the possibilities of the unthought...
...tantalizing hint of historical truth comes when Pharaoh's daughter adopts the child in the basket and names him Moses. The name is connected to a Hebrew verb indicating that she drew him from the water. Many scholars, however, think it derives from an Egyptian suffix meaning "to be born"--just as Rameses, who was considered divine, is a form of Ra-Moses, or "the god Ra is born...
...asks, to help undertake this mission? And who, exactly, is God to ask it? "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh," replies the deity, which has been translated as "I am that I am." In another response God announces his name as YHWH, a Hebrew word that may have been derived from the verb "to be." It came to be regarded as so holy that it could not be pronounced and was read out loud instead as Adonai, or "the Lord...