Choose the best answer:
It gets ............... to understand what the professor has explained.

 

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Aging is the process of growing old. It occurs eventually in every living thing provided, of course, that an illness or accident does not kill it prematurely. The most familiar outward signs of aging may be seen in old people, such as the graying of the hair and the wrinkling of the skin. Signs of aging in a pet dog or cat include loss of playfulness and energy, a decline in hearing and eyesight, or even a light graying of the coat. Plants are too, but the signs are much harder to detect. Most body parts grow bigger and stronger, and function more effiiently during childhood. They reach their peak at the time of maturity, or early adulthood. After that, they begin to decline. Bones, for example, gradually become lighter and more brittle. In the aged, the joints between the bones also become rigid and more inflxible. This can make moving very painful. All the major organs of the body show signs of aging. The brain, for example, works less effiiently, and even gets smaller in size. Thinking processes of all sorts are slowed down. Old people often have trouble in remembering recent events. One of the most serious changes of old age occurs in the arteries, the blood vessels that lead from the heart. They become thickened and constricted, allowing less blood to flw to the rest of body. This condition accounts, directly or indirectly, for many of the diseases of the aged. It may, for example, result in heart attack. Aging is not a uniform process. Different parts of the body wear out at the different rates. There are differences among people in their rate of aging. Even the cell of the body differ in the way they age. The majority of cells are capable of reproducing themselves many times during the course of a lifetime. Nerve cells and muscle fiers can never be replaced once they wear out. Gerontologists - scientists who study the process of aging - believe this wearing out of the body is controlled by a built-in biological time-clock. They are trying to discover how this clock works so that they can slow down the process. This could give man a longer life and a great number of productive years.
3. What happens to memorization when the brain begins to age?

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It’s probably the most painstaking, heart wrenching, and stress inducing test of dedication a marriage can face. But the reward at the end is pretty sweet. At the annual Wife Carrying World Championships in Sonkajärvi, Finland, male competitors race around a track hauling their female partners on their backs. Winner takes home his wife’s weight in beer. It’s no ordinary racetrack, either. Competitors must wade through a neck-deep pool of water, climb over hurdles, and run through pits of sand before crossing the finish line. While some participants don crazy costumes for the pre-race, the actual event is pretty straightlaced. Wives must weigh at least 49 kilograms (108 pounds). Any woman lighter than that is required to carry a heavy rucksack until she reaches this minimum. A participant who drops his wife will be penalized 15 seconds. But there is one catch: contestants don’t have to carry their own wives. A friend’s wife, stranger’s wife, or even a random grandmother will do – as long as she’s over 17. Contestants flock from 47 countries across the globe to show their stuff in this epic display of brute strength. This year, Finnish couple Taisto Miettinen and Kristiina Haapanen captured the title for the fourth consecutive year. The 46-year-old lawyer and his wife completed the 235-meter course in one minute and four seconds. Like any dedicated athlete, Miettinen reported that he’d been training for a while. “In last autumn, I started running in the track, one hundred, two hundred and four hundred meters,” Miettinen said in a post-race interview. He also practiced the course in ski boots to build leg strength. The competition, which began in 1992, is supposedly rooted in the legend of Ronkainen the Robber — a hardnosed gang leader who hazed potential members by making them lug sacks of grain or live pigs over a similar course. He and his comrades also made a habit of stealing women from neighboring villages as a nod to this practice, many men “steal” friends’ wives for the competition. If you want to compete but can’t make it to Finland, there’s a North American version of the contest held in October at Sunday River Resort in Maine. With 100-plus pounds of brewski on the line, you might want to tell your significant other to start shaping up.
2. The word “hauling” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ______

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Ask about “the population problem” to people of a certain age, and the first and perhaps only thing that comes to mind is the “population bomb” or “population explosion.” And they would be right - for their time. In the second half of the 20th century, rapid population growth - especially but not exclusively in the developing countries - created unprecedented increases in the number of people on the earth. And this growth was accompanied by crowding, malnutrition, disease, and poverty. Indeed, for many Americans, the coming “population explosion” was, along with the Cold War, the most unsettling fact about our world. But “population problems” have been part of American discourse for over 100 years. In the 1930s and 1940s, for instance, many observers feared that depopulation due to plummeting birth rates would cause chronic economic depression as the numbers of U.S. consumers and workers declined. In the 1920s, the U.S. “population problem” was rapid urbanization, reflected in a 1920 census count showing that for the first time more than onehalf the population lived in urban areas. Rural incumbents in the House of Representatives, fearing they would be voted out of office by their new urban constituents, succeeded in blocking reapportionment of the House’s seats on the basis of the census counts as mandated by the U.S. Constitution. The century’s first “population problem” was mass xenophobia about immigration. Beginning in 1880, wave after wave of European immigrants was creating congestion and social change at an unprecedented rate. In response to widespread anxiety and anger, Congress in 1924 passed the country’s most restrictive immigration legislation ever. Each problem was based in hard numbers. Each generated private emotions and public fears. Each suffered exaggeration and manipulation. And each commanded the attention of opinion leaders and elected officials.  
2. According to paragraph 1, what did the author imply when writing “And they would be right - for their time”?

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There’s a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.  Employees are the driving factor behind customer satisfaction. Employee interactions set the tone for a positive or negative customer experience. When employees aren’t happy at work, their interactions with customers can, and almost always will, suffer. Over the course of time, this can have serious repercussions for a business. The place where this becomes the most critical is any business where employees are directly interacting with customers, such as retail or food service. Historically underpaid and overworked, employees in these jobs are tasked with spending their entire shifts serving customers.  This is where employee experience comes in. If even a fraction of a customer experience budget was spent on employee experience, there would be a huge return on investment. One of the easiest ways to enhance employee experience is to ask for and welcome employees’ feedback. They have great insight into customer needs. After all, they’re the ones who are directly interacting with customers and hearing their criticisms and compliments firsthand. Employees can be your biggest asset when it comes to customer satisfaction.  A large part of employee experience revolves around understanding what employees need and want and gaining insight into their work preferences. Another critical piece of the employee experience is training and development. Employees should be equipped with the skills they need to excel at their jobs and have opportunities to continue to learn and develop. They should be able to check in and touch base with their managers to keep track of their progress and discuss any questions or concerns as they arise. Showing employees that you value the work they’re doing is one of the easiest ways to boost their motivation. It can be as simple as saying thank you, to publicly acknowledging and celebrating their contributions. It’s not just the younger generations who crave recognition - no one likes to feel like the work they’re doing is going unnoticed.  It’s time to shift the mindset from employees working just to work, to acknowledging that they’re valuable contributors to a company’s success. Employees need to understand how important their role is and how their work fits into the bigger picture. They need to feel like their voices are being heard and they have respect from their managers. Most importantly, they need to be able to come to work and know that the next eight hours won’t be pure torture. 
1. The passage mainly discuss ________

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Most households in the UK will have a broadband connection and a lot of those  houses will also have experienced connection or speed issues. But what if there was a way to connect to the internet and benefit from a direct connection with much faster speeds? Enter Li-Fi.  Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity and is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system which runs wireless communications that travel at very high speeds. With Li-Fi, your light blub is essentially your router. It uses common household LED light bulbs to enable data transfer, boasting speeds of up to 224 gigabits per second.  Li-Fi and Wi-Fi are quite similar as both transmit data electromagnetically. However, Wi-Fi uses radio waves, while Li-Fi runs on visible light waves. This means that it accommodates a photo-detector to receive light signals and a signal processing element to convert the data into “streamable” content. For example, data is fed into an LED light bulb, it then sends data at rapid speeds to the photo-detector. The tiny changes in the rapid dimming of LED bulbs is then converted by the “receiver” into electrical signal. The signal is then converted back into a binary data stream that we would recognise as web, video and audio applications that run on internet-enabled devices.  While some may think that Li-Fi with its 224 gigabits per second leaves Wi-Fi in the dust, Li-Fi’s exclusive use of visible light could halt a mass uptake. Li-Fi signals cannot pass through walls, so in order to enjoy full connectivity, capable LED bulbs will need to be placed throughout the home. Not to mention, Li-Fi requires the light bulb is on at all times to provide connectivity, meaning that the lights will need to be on during the day. Additionally, where there is a lack of light bulbs, there is a lack of Li-Fi internet so Li-Fi does take a hit when it comes to public Wi-Fi networks.  However, using Li-Fi instead of Wi-Fi, you’ll negate lots of security problems associated with shared and often overloaded broadband networks. It will also be advantageous in areas where radio frequency waves do not reach. Due to its impressive speeds, Li-Fi could make a huge impact on the internet of things too, with data transferred at much higher levels with even more devices able to connect to one another. 
5. The word “It” in paragraph 2 refers to _____

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Water is of vital importance to all living things. Without it, all living things will  surely die. We also use a great (1)_____ of water daily in our homes, in factories, and in power stations. Most of this water is fresh water and it comes to us from reservoirs, rivers and lakes.  The Earth’s surface is (2)_____ by large areas of water which we call oceans and seas. If you have tasted the water from the sea, you will know that, unlike fresh water, seawater tastes salty. This is due to the (3)_____ of sodium chloride which comes from the land. Rivers carry it to the sea.  Although (4)_______salt nor fresh water has (5)________color, the sea often looks blue in the sunlight. The reason is that sunlight is made up of many colors. Some colors disappear quickly in the sea but blue light bounces back or is reflected, to the surface. This makes the sea look blue. Hence, a stormy sky will make the sea look grey

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Why has Holmes continued to (1) _________________ generation after generation when other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s (2)____________. Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stony Hurst. (3)___________ 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a (4)__________ degree, and made another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he played around with stories (5)____________ on an ‘amateur private detec-tive’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ – pulp fiction for the masses

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Mohammed BK, who aims to connect Somalis in Bristol with their heritage, has been  confirmed for the Somali Week Festival, in 2020. Mohammed BK has been named as “cultural ambassador” for the Somali community. Ayan Mohamoud who is UK’s Somaliland Ambassador told the BBC he will now become a fixed part of the annual festivities. She said: “Young people who don’t speak Somali at all have memorised his music word-for-word and that is something that has never been done before by any Somali artist. He has been touring the country promoting citizenship and cultural unity throughout his career.”  Susan Elmi, 25, has been a fan of Mohammed BK for many years. She said: "In the Somali culture many people communicated their emotions and thoughts through songs and poetry and this is going back centuries. This man is bringing that back and making the younger generation question and explore our rich legacy. I think it’s just what the Somali Diaspora needs to say well connected to the identity.”  Mohammed BK also promotes education and advises young people to “use their time and resources wisely here in the UK because that is something their parents sacrificed fleeing from their homeland”. He added: “I thought to myself if I have that much influence on thousands and thousands of young people from my community, I need to put my platform to good use in encouraging them to do good and seek opportunities”. Festival fan Ameira Hassan, 45, said: “It’s a huge thing for our kids to take part in their history and culture. It’s important to us because they are learning a lot. Twenty years ago we never used to have anything like this in the UK and our kids never had any knowledge of the Somali culture.” 
1. What is main topic of the passage?

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Being part of a community with long history rooted in agriculture, Vietnamese people  especially those from older generations hold a strong belief for superstition about luck and bad luck. Even though people have become much less superstitious as they were before, some traditions still (1) ____ on until today like people’s habit. Let’s take a closer look at some common food-related superstitions and explore the reasoning behind them.  Regarding what food to avoid before taking an important examination, homophones and the shape of your food comes into (2) ____. These features are the criteria that people use to decide which food is good and what is bad to eat before an important examination. Students are restrained from eating bananas prior to an exam for (3) ____ of failing ‘like sliding on a banana skin’  They are also advised eating squid, which when disturbed, emit a substance that is ‘as black as ink’. The phrase carries the connotation of a black (bad) mark on your test. Eating squash, pumpkin, melon and peanuts was also a (4) ____. The words for pumpkin and melon in Vietnamese mean “stuck” and the word for peanut means to be ‘lost’ or ‘digress’. Duck meat and eggs are associated with bad luck since the shape of an egg resembles the zero number. On the (5) ____, eating any type of beans is considered good before an exam since bean in Vietnamese means the same thing with to ‘pass a test

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It was at this time, 1876–1877, that a new invention called the telephone emerged. It is not easy to determine who the inventor was. Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted independent patent applications concerning telephones to the patent office in Washington on February 14, 1876. Bell, in Boston at the time, was represented by his lawyers and had no idea that the application had been submitted. Gray’s application arrived at the patent office a few hours before Bell’s, but Bell’s lawyers insisted on paying the application fee immediately; as a result, the heavily burdened office registered Bell’s application first. Bell’s patent was approved and officially registered on March 7, and three days later the famous call is said to have been made when Bell’s summons to his assistant confirmed that the invention worked. Alexander Graham Bell, one year younger than Lars Magnus Ericsson, had been born in Edinburgh. Bell’s interest in telephony came through his mother, who was deaf, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who was a teacher of elocution, famous for the phonetic transcription system he had developed to help the deaf learn to speak. The Bell family migrated to Canada in 1870; two years later Alexander Melville Bell was offered a teaching post at a school for the deaf in Boston in the United States, but he successfully recommended his son for the post instead. Father and son were at this time working together to try to discover whether sound could be made visible for the deaf with the help of telegraphy.  But many others had already been pursuing the idea of telephony for years. A resolution of the US House of Representatives in June 2002 claimed that Bell had nefariously acquired and exploited an apparatus, the “teletrophono”, invented by Antonio Meucci long before Bell and Gray. One damaging piece of evidence for Bell was that Meucci’s material had disappeared without trace from the very laboratory at which Bell was carrying out his experiments. In the 1880s, proceedings initiated by the American government charged Bell with “fraudulent and dishonest conduct” and claimed that his patent should be revoked. These proceeding were discontinued after Meucci’s death in 1889 and the expiry of Bell’s patent in 1893. A later investigation, published by A. Edward Evenson in 2000, claims that Bell’s attorneys acquired technical details from Gray’s attorneys that are said to have been added to Bell’s patent after it had been submitted. The whole saga has elements reminiscent of a thriller. One salient fact was that Bell saw no need to take out patents for the telephone in the Nordic countries. This meant that anyone anywhere there was free to manufacture and sell telephones. Bell presented the telephone before a large audience for the first time at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia in June 1876. In the audience was the physicist William Thomson, who in August that year presented Bell’s telephone to the British Association in Glasgow. In Sweden, on September 30 that year, Dagens Nyheter became the first newspaper to refer to “the speaking telegraph”, an apparatus that “plainly and clearly conveyed the words uttered at one end of the telegraph line to the other”. The first version of Bell’s telephone, as it was described in the patent application, was not suitable for practical purposes. Only after “a relatively thorough reconstruction”, to quote Hemming Johansson, could a telephone be designed for large-scale production. The Bell Telephone Company began operating on July 11, 1877. In the same month, the first useable Bell telephone arrived in Europe to be presented in Plymouth to the British Association by the chief engineer of the General Post Office, William H. Preece, in the presence of Bell himself  
2. According to paragraph 1, Bell’s application was registered first because _____

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In the early twentieth century, an American woman named Emily Post wrote a book on etiquette. This book explained the proper behavior Americans should follow in many different social (1)______, from birthday parties to funerals. But in modern society, it is not simply to know the proper rules for behavior in your own country. It is necessary for people (2)______ work or travel abroad to understand the rules of etiquette in other cultures as well. Cultural (3)______ can be found in such simple processes as giving or receiving a gift. In Western cultures, a gift can be given to the receiver with relatively little ceremony. When a gift is offered, the receiver usually takes the gift and expresses his or her thanks. (4)______, in some Asian countries, the act of gift–giving may appear confusing to Westerners. In Chinese culture, both the giver and receiver understand that the receiver will typically refuse to take the gift several times before he or she finally accepts it. In addition, to (5)______ respect for the receiver, it is common in several Asian cultures to use both hands when offering a gift to another person.

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Most of the roughly 1,400 active volcanoes around the world, including many in the  United States, do not have on-site observatories. Lacking ground-level data, scientists are turning to satellites to keep tabs on volcanoes from space. Now using artificial intelligence, scientists have created a new satellite-based method of detecting warning signs of when a volcano is likely to erupt.  Every time one of the satellites passes over a given volcano, it can capture an InSAR image of the volcano from which ground movement away from or toward the satellite can be calculated.  InSAR can often pick up the ominous expansion of the ground that occurs when magma moves within a volcano’s plumbing, but it is difficult to continuously monitor the huge number of images produced by the latest generation of SAR-equipped satellites. In addition, some volcanoes exhibit long-lasting deformation that poses no immediate threat, and new images must be compared with older ones to determine whether a deformation at a volcano is a warning sign or just business as usual. To solve these issues, the researchers turned to machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that can glean subtle patterns in vast quantities of data. They developed an algorithm that can rapidly analyze InSAR data, compare current deformation to past activity, and automatically create an alert when a volcano’s unrest may be cause for concern.  To test the algorithm’s viability, the team applied it to real data from the period leading up to the 2018 eruption of Sierra Negra, a volcano in the Galápagos Islands. The algorithm worked, flagging an increase in the ground’s inflation that began about a year before the eruption. Had the method been available at the time, the team writes, it would have accurately alerted researchers that Sierra Negra was likely to erupt.
3. The word “it” in paragraph 2 refers to _______

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Do you find the American education system to be confusing and different from the education system in your own country? Do you want to attend a university or a school in the USA? The American education system offers international students the most diverse set of options in the world. In fact, an international student who elects to take advantage of the American education system can pursue anything from nuclear science to film and dance. The possibilities are almost endless! The American education system requires that students complete 12 years of primary and secondary education prior to attending university or college. This may be accomplished either at public (or government-operated) schools, or at private schools. These 12 years of schooling (or their equivalent) may also be completed outside the USA, thus giving foreign students the opportunity to pursue the benefits of the American education system and obtain a quality American education. Perhaps one of the most impressive facts is the large number of presidents, prime ministers and leaders from other countries who have experienced the American education system and graduated from a university or school in the USA. In many fields and industries, the American education system offers the most cutting-edge, soughtafter programs at the world’s best schools. That is why graduating from an accredited American school and being exposed to the rigors of the American education system is an investment in your future. Whether you want to study at a USA university, a top college, or at an ESL, vocational or high school, a thorough understanding of how the American education system works is essential. Without a clear grasp of the system, an international student will find it difficult to make the right academic choices. The information provided in the Overview of the American education system section will help you develop that understanding. You can also search our list of Universities, colleges, community colleges, graduate schools, and boys and girls boarding schools. It is no surprise that the United States hosts more international students than any other country in the world!  
5. What is probably the best title for the passage?

Rewrite the sentence:
It’s educational to watch this channel.

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The ability to be independent is something that not everyone possesses. (1)_______, you need to be independent in order to survive in the world. Learning to support yourself is (2) ________ for any success you ever hope to achieve. At the end of the day, you only have yourself to fall back on, so it is exceedingly important to be able to handle things on your own. It is all about being secure with who you are and what you believe in. It is extremely empowering knowing that you are (3)________control of your own life and your own choices. It is much more beneficial to listen to the voice inside yourself rather than the berating (4) ________of others. We rely on others far more than it is necessary. People put their happiness in the hands of a significant other, thinking this will bring them fulfillment. This is a fatal error too many people make these days. Do you always want to feel dependent on someone else? Of course not. Not only are you limiting yourself, you are more than likely becoming a burden to this person. We need to learn how to make decisions on our own. I understand asking your friends their opinion on a fashion decision, but do we really need to consult others on every minimal decision we have to make? Think of things (5)________ are in your best interest and choose that option

Choose the best answer:
You should give up ____ your sister.

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Spend just a minute watching the world population counter tick up on Worldometers and you’ll see just how quickly we’re swelling in numbers. The current figure stands at around 7.7 billion, and this is projected to become 9.8 billion by 2050, according to the UN. More people means more carbon footprints - more cars, waste and emissions, more houses and infrastructure to be constructed using the world’s limited resources, more mouths to be fed using more water and energy in food production. Governments recognise the severity of the situation and have mostly come together over global policies like the UN’s Paris Agreement, to limit carbon emissions and their impact on climate change. In addition, new technologies are being developed to make our use of resources more efficient. As for controlling population growth, the education of women is one key factor. Research shows the higher level to which a woman is educated, the fewer children she is likely to have. In Ghana, for example, women who have been to high school, have a fertility rate of between two and three children, compared with six for those who have no education. This could be for several reasons including learning about desired family size and understanding child health better. This means that the mother is more confident her children will survive. She is also likely to hold more sway within the family, arguing for fewer children if that is what she wants.  There is also plenty that individuals can do to reduce their personal footprint. Earth Overshoot Day is defined as the day when humanity has used up nature’s resource budget for the year. The Global Footprint Network calculates that moving Earth Overshoot day back by five days every year would mean that, by 2050, we’d be using the resources of less than one planet. Just eating 50% less meat and replacing it with vegetarian alternatives could save the planet five days. As David Attenborough says, if we want to save Earth, we can no longer afford to keep eating meat: “We are omnivores, so biologically, if you could have a biological morality, you can say, yes we evolved to eat pretty well everything. But now we’ve got to a stage in our own social evolution in which that is no longer practical.” Sir David says he himself now eats less meat and is bolstered by the knowledge that it’s helping the planet.  
2. The word “swelling” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to _______

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I want to go to the __________ high school to learn about farming method.

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Parents usually decide on given names for their children before they are born. In some  families the oldest boy is given the same name as his father. In the US the word junior or senior, or a number, is added after the name and surname to make (1) ____ clear which persons is being referred to. For example, the son of William Jones Sr (Senior) (2) ____ be called William Jones Jr (Junior), and his son would be called William Jones III (“William Jones the third”).  Many popular names come from the Bible, e.g. Jacob, Joshua, Matthew, Mary, Rebecca and Sarah, (3) ____ this does not imply that the people who choose them are (4) ____. Other people give their children the name of somebody they admire, such as a famous sports personality, or a film or pop star. In Britain, the name William and Harry became common again after the sons of Prince Charles were given these names. In the US Chelsea was not a common name for a girl (5) _____President Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea came to public attention