номер 2, страница 60 - гдз по английскому языку 10 класс рабочая тетрадь Вербицкая, Уайт

Track ten.

I get sick of all the ads on TV. It seems that every ten minutes they interrupt the program with the same ads that you saw in the last break.

That doesn't annoy me as much as product placement.

What's product placement?

You know, when companies pay for their product to be in a film or book.

They don't do that, do they?

Yes, of course, they do. Big companies pay to have, oh, say, their can of cola in the hand of the big star of a Hollywood film. Obviously, it's only used in a positive way. You never see the bad guy with the product.

I didn't know they did that.

Oh, yes. Once you know about it, it's quite obvious. In that Tom Cruise film, uh, Minority Report, there were product placements for clothes, cars, mobile phones, anything, everything.

I'm shocked. I think it's really sneaky.

I agree. But at least now you know they're trying to influence you and you'll notice it. What's really bad is subliminal advertising.

What on earth is subliminal advertising?

It's when the ad is so subtle that your conscious mind doesn't know it has seen a word or a picture, but you have a subconscious memory of it.

You're making this up.

No, I'm not. Honestly. The advertiser puts something in that is so quick that you don't know it's happened. Your brain has a subconscious memory, but you don't remember when the information was put in your head.

That's terrible. It's like brainwashing or mind control.

Yes, it could be used in propaganda, you know, when a government wants you to believe something. It's very controversial. There were lots of experiments in the nineteen fifties.

What happened in the experiments?

Well, I was just going to explain. Scientists couldn't prove that subliminal advertising really works, but governments were very worried about the possibility. So the technique's illegal in most countries in TV and cinema ads.

That's a relief.

Yes, but there are rumors that some spam, you know, junk emails and things like that, has subliminal advertising. You get spam and the word buy flashes up for ten milliseconds. It's too quick for your eye, but your brain gets the message.

Are you sure about all of this? You're making me very suspicious of everything.

Well, you should be. If you were more suspicious, you might stop buying every latest thing that comes your way.