insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

abstract the present study investigated the effects of task types and involvement load hypothesis on incidental learning of 10 target words (tws) in junior high schools (jhss) in givi, ardabil. the tasks deployed in this study were two input-based tasks (reading plus dictionary use with an involvement index of 3, and reading plus gap-fill task with an involvement index of 2), and one output-ba...

the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

abstract the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of a rather newly developed method in language teaching that is the use of paragraph reading task and whole reading task and their effects on improving efl learner’s speaking ability. to fulfill the purpose of the study, first 90 participants studying their course at sa eedi high school in tehran were chosen by means of ...

the purpose of this study was to investigate how english language teachers in mashhad who teach students in the pre-university cycle perceived the impact of the efltee on their teaching. the target population was nearly all pre-university english language teachers in seven districts of mashhad in the scholastic year 2008/2009. a survey questionnaire which consisted of (36) likert type items, wa...

this thesis basically deals with the well-known notion of the bear-invariant of groups, which is the generalization of the schur multiplier of groups. in chapter two, section 2.1, we present an explicit formula for the bear-invariant of a direct product of cyclic groups with respect to nc, c>1. also in section 2.2, we caculate the baer-invatiant of a nilpotent product of cyclic groups wuth resp...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

abstract the first purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of consciousness-raising (c-r) activities on learning grammatical structures (simple present tense in this case) by iranian guidance school efl learners. the second one was to investigate the effect of gender on learning the simple present tense through c-r activities and tasks. finally, this study aimed to investigate the ...

abstract: in the paper of black and scholes (1973) a closed form solution for the price of a european option is derived . as extension to the black and scholes model with constant volatility, option pricing model with time varying volatility have been suggested within the frame work of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (garch) . these processes can explain a number of em...