Directions: Read the following text and choose the most suitable heading from A-F for each paragraph. There is one extra heading which you do not need.

A. Tricks of dishonest advertisers

B. Types of advertisement readers

C. Customers’ opinions on advertisers

D. Functions of advertising

AB. Interactions between the advertisers and the customers

AC. Benefits one may get from reading honest advertisements.

When you see a clever advertisement in a newspaper, do you say to yourself, “Ah, that’s good. I’d like to have one of these”? Or do you say, “What lies are they telling this time? It can’t be very good or they wouldn’t have to advertise it so cleverly”? Both of these people exist: the fist are optimists; the second pessimists and realists.

Advertisements can be extremely useful if they are honest: if, let us say, you have broken you pen and you want to buy another, the first thing to do is to look at as many advertisements for pens as you can find. That will help you to choose the model, color and price that suits you. Advertisements save a lot of time and trouble in a quick and simple way. If the advertisements are true and accurate, the customers will be satisfied and will probably buy from the same firm nest time and advise their friends and acquaintances to do the same.

Some advertisers hope to sell his goods quickly and to make a large profit on them. They know that no customers will buy from them a second time or recommend the products to their friends. Other advertisers make claims for their products which they know perfectly well to be incapable of verification, like advertising that a certain toothpaste contains a particular substance knowing that this substance is in fact neither beneficial or harmful to the teeth. Such advertisements do not tell downright lies, but their advertising is deliberately misleading.

If there was no advertising, fewer goods would be sold, so the cost of each article would be higher. The more you advertise, the more cheaply you can afford to sell your products. Advertising also encourages makers to improve their goods continually. One manufacturer of soap-power claims that his products does not harm housewives’ hands, and quotes the opinions of prominent doctors to prove this. All other soap-powder manufacturers are forced to make their products harmless too.

As advertisers become more and more expert at their work, they appeal to all the human emotions in the effort to increase sales: love of a bargain, fear of ill health, the desire to show off and many others. But more and more customers are also becoming suspicious of and resistant to high-powered advertising. This is producing a deliberately modest advertisement that is intended to disarm the customers’ suspicions by giving an impression of absolute sincerity, or even of deliberate understatement.

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