A.  Freeborn woman

B.  Girls

C.  Slaves

D.  Freedmen

Girls had equal inheritance rights with boys if their father died without leaving a will. A Roman mother’s right to own property and to dispose of it as she saw fit, including setting the terms of her own will, gave her enormous influence over her sons even when they were adults. Because of their legal status as citizens and the degree to which they could become emancipated, women could own property, enter contracts, and engage in business.

Next, slaves and the law. At the time of Augustus, as many as 35% of the people in Italy were slaves, making Rome one of five historical “slave societies” in which slaves constituted at least a fifth of the population and played a major role in the economy. Slavery was a complex institution that supported traditional Roman social structures as well as contributing economic utility. In urban settings, slaves might be professionals such as teachers, physicians, chefs, and accountants, in addition to the majority of slaves who provided trained or unskilled labour in households or workplaces. Agriculture and industry, such as milling and mining, relied on the exploitation of slaves. Slavery ceased gradually in the 6th and 7th centuries along with the decline of urban centers in the West and the disintegration of the complex Imperial economy that had created the demand for it.

Laws pertaining to slavery were “extremely intricate”. Under Roman law, slaves were considered property and had no legal personhood. They could be subjected to forms of corporal punishment not normally exercised on citizens, exploitation, torture, and summary execution. Slaves had no right to the form of legal marriage. Over time slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters.

Finally, we’ll talk about the status of Freedmen. Rome differed from Greek city-states in allowing freed slaves to become citizens. After manumission, a slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership but active political freedom (Libertas), including the right to vote. A slave who had acquired Libertas was in relation to his former master, who then became his patron: the two parties continued to have customary and legal obligations to each other.

A libertinus was not entitled to hold public office or the highest state priesthoods, but he could play a priestly role in the cult of the emperor. He could not marry a woman from a family of senatorial rank, nor achieve legitimate senatorial rank himself, but during the early Empire, freedmen held key positions in the government bureaucracy.  Any future children of a freedman would be born free, with full rights of citizenship.

RP      Rodger Platt

JP        Jean Picard

AR      Anne Reynolds

MS     Mary Smithers

PF       Peter Finch

DB      Dallas Baker

Most foods are best as fresh as possible. Rodger Platt remembers picking peaches at my grandfather’s ranch in Northern California and eating them on the spot. “What taste! But the exceptions to this rule are the many wines that actually need some aging to taste their best. Winemakers know this and work to control the aging process including decisions they make about how to bottle up their product”.

“One aspect of aging has to do with the reaction of fruit acids with alcohol. This process reduces sourness in the wine, but it’s really only important for very tart wines, the ones coming from cold climates.”

The complex oxidation process is the second aspect of aging. An expert Peter Finch states “when oxygen interacts with wine, it produces many changes – ultimately yielding an oxidized wine that has a nutty aroma. This is a desired taste for sherry styles, but quickly compromises the aromas in fresh white wines.”

However, the oxidation process provides benefits along the way to that unwanted endpoint. Many wines develop undesirable aromas under anaerobic –no oxygen– conditions; a small amount of oxygen will eliminate those trace thiol compounds responsible for the aroma of rotten eggs or burnt rubber. Anne Reynolds, a chemist new to the field of wine suggests that “oxidation products also react with the red anthocyanin molecules from the grapes to create stable pigments in red wine.”

Jane Thornton who works in the Barossa Valley near Adelaide, Australia, says “the way a bottle is sealed will directly affect how much oxygen passes into the wine each year. That will directly affect the aging trajectory and determine when that wine will be at its best.”

Glass is a hermetic material, meaning zero oxygen can pass through it. But all wine bottle closures admit at least a smidgen of oxygen. The actual amount is the key to a closure’s performance. “A typical cork will let in about one milligram of oxygen per year”, states Jean Picard, an Australian chemist. “This sounds like a tiny bit, but after two or three years, the cumulative amount can be enough to break down the sulfites that winemakers add to protect the wine from oxidation.”

“There are three major closure options available: natural cork and technical cork, its low budget brother made of cork particles, the screw cap, and synthetic corks. Natural cork closures appeared about 250 years ago, displacing the oiled rags and wooden plugs that had previously been used to seal bottles. It created the possibility of aging wine. Until 20 years ago natural corks were pretty much the only option for quality wine. It’s produced from the bark of the tree, and harvested every seven years throughout the life of a cork oak tree, Quercus suber. The cork cylinder is cut from the outside to the inside of the bark.”

“A small fraction of corks, 1–2% today”, says Dallas Baker, “end up tainting the wine with a moldy smelling substance, trichloro anisole (TCA). This TCA is created via a series of chemical reactions in the bottle: chlorine from the environment reacts with the natural lignin molecules in the woody cork to make trichlorophenol, which is in turn methylated by mold. TCA has one of the most potent aromas in the world – some people can smell as little as 2 parts per trillion in wine.” Mary Smithers explains that for this reason, “in every eight cases of wine, one or two bottles will smell like wet cardboard or simply not taste their best. This is why restaurants let you taste the wine before pouring – to let you judge if the wine is tainted. A 1% failure rate seems high in today’s world”.

A.      Traditional

B.      Cognitive

C.      Schemata

D.     Meta – cognitive

The traditional view
According to Dole et al. (1991), in the traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read.

·         Readers are passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and the reader has to reproduce meaning.

·         According to Nunan (1991), reading in this view is basically a matter of decoding a series of written symbols into their aural equivalents in the quest for making sense of the text. He referred to this process as the ‘bottom-up‘ view of reading.

·         McCarthy (1999) has called this view ‘outside-in‘ processing, referring to the idea that meaning exists in the printed page and is interpreted by the reader then taken in.

·         This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words and structure.

Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is also necessary for comprehension to take place. To counteract over-reliance on form in the traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced.

The cognitive view
The ‘top-down’ model is in direct opposition to the ‘bottom-up’ model. According to Nunan (1991) and Dubin and Bycina (1991), the psycholinguistic model of reading and the top-down model are in exact concordance.

·         Goodman (1967; cited in Paran, 1996) presented reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game, a process in which readers sample the text, make hypotheses, confirm or reject them, make new hypotheses, and so forth. Here, the reader rather than the text is at the heart of the reading process.

·         The schema theory

·         The schema theory of reading also fits within the cognitively based view of reading. Rumelhart (1977) has described schemata as “building blocks of cognition“ which are used in the process of interpreting sensory data, in retrieving information from memory, in organizing goals and subgoals, in allocating resources, and in guiding the flow of the processing system.

·         Rumelhart (1977) has also stated that if our schemata are incomplete and do not provide an understanding of the incoming data from the text we will have problems processing and understanding the text.

Cognitively based views of reading comprehension emphasize the interactive nature of reading and the constructive nature of comprehension. Dole et al. (1991) have stated that, besides knowledge brought to bear on the reading process, a set of flexible, adaptable strategies are used to make sense of a text and to monitor ongoing understanding.

The metacognitive view
According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on “whether reading is a bottom-up, language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process.” It is also no more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on both L1 and L2 readers. Research has gone even further to define the control readers execute on their ability to understand a text. This control, Block (1992) has referred to as metacognition.

Metacognition involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Klein et al. (1991) stated that strategic readers attempt the following while reading:

·         Identifying the purpose of the reading before reading

·         Identifying the form or type of text before reading

·         Thinking about the general character and features of the form or type of the text. For instance, they try to locate a topic sentence and follow supporting details toward a conclusion

·         Projecting the author’s purpose for writing the text (while reading it),

·         Choosing, scanning, or reading in detail

·         Making continuous predictions about what will occur next, based on information obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained within the previous stages.

Moreover, they attempt to form a summary of what was read. To carry out the previous steps requires the reader to be able to classify, sequence, establish whole-part relationships, compare and contrast, determine cause-effect, summarise, hypothesize and predict, infer, and conclude.