He called out a warning from the kitchen. Synonyms call call cry out exclaim blurt burst out These words all mean to shout or say something loudly or suddenly. I cried out his name.
Oxford Collocations Dictionary adverb softly loudly out … preposition for to See full entry. Extra Examples We called but they were out. She said she was very lonely and it was kind of them to call on her. Could you call by later today? I called round at the house to check how things were. In North American English the most common word is call , but phone is also used. Speakers of North American English do not say ring. Telephone is very formal and is used mainly in British English.
Nouns You can use call or phone call more formal in both British English and North American English : Were there any phone calls for me? How do I make a local call? I know, I know, it was ridiculous. While I can laugh about it now, I also think about the darker side of it: I was so ashamed of my name, so ashamed of myself that I chose to cut out my wonderful Indian culture to be able to navigate life more easily.
Even dwelling on all of this makes me so emotional; how could I have missed the wonderful aspects of myself and my Indian culture? Not British enough, not Indian enough. Constantly I find my name with a squiggly line under it on Microsoft Word often autocorrected with silly replacements.
In emails, it is misspelt by others despite my full name being included in my email address or when my signature is placed at the bottom. This became apparent to me when I had a family friend ask if they could call me Bianca my middle name because Nupur was too hard for them to even attempt to pronounce.
My qualms with my name may sound minor or trivial to some, but they are definitely a reflection of wider cultural issues. The experiences that I have faced at Oxford reveal a need for people to be more accommodating and to get used to making more of an effort for people with names like mine.
If we can pronounce and spell names like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tchaikovsky, we can do the same with any name, especially ethnic ones. We are particularly interested in their capacity to justify their views and interpretations. This involves being able to analyse concepts and to critically appraise arguments and the reasoning behind a position, as well as to consider objections and to offer rebuttals to those objections.
This would be suggesting that the law is based on preventing harm. We might then explore whether this is the only purpose or the dominant purpose of the law, and how that might shape how legal rules need to be constructed, whether there are any circumstances in which exceptions might be valid and how effective exceptions could be created.
Here, we would be looking to see how well they can see the problems with their approach and the difficulties inherent in drafting a rule that works in every situation without being too broad. This line of discussion would draw out their capacity to respond to challenges to their position, their ability to amend their initial answer when it no longer seems sustainable, and their ability to think precisely.
Another candidate might suggest that even if no one is harmed, it is important that laws are respected and we could examine why this is the case. This could lead into more philosophical discussions of what it means for a law to be binding and how legal rules might differ from moral rules or guidelines.
A candidate might begin to consider whether there is something special about legal rules — are they different from other kinds of rules, such as those of a game, moral rules, social rules, club rules and so on. We could use this as a way into exploring with them whether the fact that something is illegal is itself a reason not to do something, over and above, perhaps, the harm the rule is aiming to prevent. A young woman from a prominent white family in your town has been killed.
She was white, and a rumour is spreading that the killer was a young black man, even though no evidence of this has been brought forward. There is increasing disquiet in the community. Some people are scared for their female relations, while the family and their friends are desperate to avenge her death. You are particularly concerned that there will be violence amongst the townspeople, and possibly racially-motivated killings, if nothing is done. You have no idea who the real killer is.
A homeless man comes to town. He has no friends or family in the town; no-one has seen him before as far as you know. You do not suspect he committed the murder.
However, you do think you would be able to concoct enough false evidence to convince a jury that he killed the young woman and sentence him to death. Do you concoct the evidence to save the town from violence and potentially prevent the deaths of numerous people? Would you concoct new evidence?
This is a complicated question and we would take the candidate through the scenario slowly and discuss their reasoning to the first part before moving on to each variation in turn. This question delves into the role of the law in society and what is meant by justice. There are many ways to answer it. What we would want to see is the candidate reasoning about issues like whether the sheriff should be purely utilitarian and act so as to prevent violence, or whether other considerations like justice should override this, even if it means loss of innocent life.
Strong responses would include lots of explanation of their thinking about why there might be good reasons for the law to be committed to only punishing the guilty; the goals of punishment and its justifications; and why we need to promote trust in law enforcement institutions and the law. Really great answers might think about how rules of evidence aim to promote justice, and might consider how something could be a technicality or not.
Candidates could also think about what a purely utilitarian legal system might look like and the problems it might pose, and why even if the law must be utilitarian in many ways, this needs to be tempered with other considerations. How hot does the air have to be in a hot air balloon if I wanted to use it to lift an elephant? When I actually used this question in interviews, no-one actually got as far as an actual 'X degrees C' answer in the ten minutes or so we allowed for it, nor did we expect them to.
We use this sort of question to try to find how applicants think about problems, and how they might operate within a tutorial.
We make this clear to interviewees before even giving them questions of this type. Things we are looking for include how readily they can see into the core of a problem what's the essential physics in this?
What else operates like one? Imagine a ladder leaning against a vertical wall with its feet on the ground. The middle rung of the ladder has been painted a different colour on the side, so that we can see it when we look at the ladder from the side on.
What shape does that middle rung trace out as the ladder falls to the floor? So eventually they will fall back on maths, and try to model the situation using equations.
This is a fun question because the answer is typically the opposite of what they expect because they think about the shape the ladder makes when it falls which is a series of tangents to a curve centred away from the wall and the floor.
So here is something to investigate. Maths interviews are usually conducted over a piece of paper, sometimes at a white board and so diagrams will get drawn and the student will find the answers are 1, 2, 3, 5 for the first four cases. Some systematic care may be needed to explain why the fourth answer is 5 and why no sixth solution has been missed.
At this point I usually tell the student the next two answers at 8 and 13 — any thoughts on the emerging pattern? The next stage of the interview is about understanding why that pattern should be appearing here. When done with this bit of the interview hopefully the student has taken on board a few new ideas. So the question moves on to: 3 x n rectangular grids and 3 x 1 tiles, to 3 x n rectangular grids and 2 x 1 tiles. One of the reasons I found this a good question in the past was that its knowledge content is low, no more than GCSE.
But its internal complexity is sufficiently difficult to test the brightest students, especially in the final part, whilst also allowing students repeated chances to show what they were learning and share their thinking.
Put these countries in order by their crude mortality deaths per thousand of the population : Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK. Interviews for Medicine aim to gauge candidates' understanding of the science underpinning the study of medicine, as well as skills in scientific enquiry.
This question invites candidates to think about a public health question and epidemiology that can be approached in many different ways, without necessarily knowing anything about specific mortality rates around the world. We would expect the initial discussion to probe the differing causes of death that contribute to mortality rates — such as those 'Western diseases' heart disease and cancer — and how they compare to those found in developing countries high infant mortality, infectious diseases, poor nutrition, high rates of HIV etc.
The majority of candidates will expect Bangladesh or South Africa to have the highest crude mortality rate, and will be surprised to find that it is in fact Japan. The other part of the mortality rate calculation is of course the age of the population: we would ideally steer the conversation towards a discussion of why a wealthy but older country like Japan might have a higher mortality rate, while a country like Bangladesh — which many people might initially expect to have a high mortality rate due to relative poverty as a country — actually has a relatively lower mortality rate because of its young population.
Similarly, Britain actually has the second-highest mortality rate because of the age structure of its population: we are a relatively old country and a majority of deaths occur in older people. We wouldn't expect students to get the right answer on their own, and in fact that's not the point: the point is to see how they apply their understanding of social and cultural factors in health and illness to a problem of epidemiology. Some students might already have a detailed knowledge of demography, others might need to be given more relevant information — the point isn't what they know, it's what questions they ask to make their conclusions, and how they interpret information to draw those conclusions.
We might then go on to discuss how you could make a valid comparison between mortality rates in different countries. The viruses that infect us are totally dependent on human cells for their reproduction; is it therefore surprising that viruses cause human diseases? Like most good interview questions, this could be a starting point for any number of interesting conversations. Most candidates will have a reasonable understanding that viruses are essentially parasitic genetic entities, but the interviewers are not really looking for factual knowledge.
In a tutorial-style discussion, strong candidates will engage with the paradox that viruses need us for their own reproduction, and yet cause us damage. They might point out that some of our responses to viral infection such as sneezing favour the spread of the virus.
The interviewer might steer the discussion towards viral infections associated with high mortality, and the idea that any virus that killed off its host entirely would run the risk of extinction — unless it could infect other host species too. Candidates may have come across examples of viruses that jump from non-human animals to human hosts in this way. We might then ask if the candidate considers it possible that there are viruses that infect humans and reproduce successfully, but do not cause any disease.
How might we go about finding and characterising such viruses? These questions probe selection criteria including problem-solving, critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, communication skills, ability to listen and compatibility with the tutorial format. Is it a judgment about content or style? Could it be seen in and of itself a value judgment? How useful is it as a label? What if we said that all art is, in fact, political? What about cases where an author denies that their work is political, but critics assert that it is — is it purely a question of subjective interpretation?
And so on. The interviewers would provide prompt questions to help guide the discussion. A strong candidate would show ready willingness and very good ability to engage and develop their ideas in conversation. This question arose out of discussion of a few poems that a candidate said he had read, and we were talking through how these poems were conveying meaning through things such as tone and the imagery they used.
We wanted to push the candidate into more conceptual thinking to test his intellectual curiosity and how he would handle moving from familiar particulars the poems he knew to less familiar ways of approaching them.
What's important for candidates to realise is that we don't expect a single correct answer to such a question; it's a starting point for a new direction of discussion: what sorts of 'difficulties' might we have in mind? Are these specific to poetry or do they also feature in other types of writing?
What most interests us is that candidates are willing to venture down a new path, however uncertain this may feel: to have a go and show that they have the potential to develop their thinking further — and thus thrive on the sort of course we offer. Literature forms an important part of a Modern Languages degree at Oxford, but we know that most candidates won't have studied literature formally before in the language for which they're applying.
What we want to know isn't that they've read a certain number of texts to prove their interest, but that they have the aptitude for studying texts: that they're able to think carefully and imaginatively about whatever they've had chance to read poems, prose, drama that's interested them, in any language. Although I would never launch this question at a candidate on its own, it might grow out of a discussion.
Students sometimes say they like studying Spanish, for example, because they 'love the language'. In order to get a student thinking critically and analytically, the question would get them to consider what constitutes the language they enjoy — is it defined by particular features or by function what it does?
How does form relate to meaning? To further their subject interest and to discover whether the Oxford Modern Languages course is a good fit for them, candidates are encouraged to try reading some literary texts in the foreign language.
We know that most won't have studied literature formally before in the language for which they're applying, so this will be reading that they've undertaken independently. In that respect, short stories, such as those by Guy de Maupassant, are a good and a popular place to start: they're engaging, memorable and can feel quite approachable. After developing this discussion for a short while, we might then push outwards from particular narratives to broader, conceptual issues, such as 'what is a short story?
This isn't a question on which we'd necessarily have expected the candidate to have reflected already; it would be the beginning of a conversation, which would start by breaking down the question itself and building up an answer gradually: what might we want to think about in making such a comparison? What elements of plot design or structure or character presentation might differ?
Are there, in fact, salient differences? Is it a valid opposition to make? We'd be looking for a willingness to try out new ways of thinking and an aptitude for thinking carefully and imaginatively through a perhaps initially unfamiliar issue. I might use this question early in an interview in order to set the candidate thinking, and to elicit some idea of their motivation before moving on to more specific questions.
What about Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, etc.? Can we not in fact still consider French a global language? This is a good question as it helps us to see how candidates think about both languages and literature. They might be able to tell us about the challenges of translation, about what sorts of things resist literal or straightforward translation from one language to another, and this would give us an indication of how aware they are of how languages work.
They might also tell us about literary language, and why literary texts in particular use language in ways that make translation problematic. This might lead to a discussion of what is distinct about literary works, and this helps us to see what kind of reader they are more broadly.
We don't do this with the expectation that they have already read any particular works, however, but in order to get a sense of why they think it is worth studying literatures in foreign languages. This is an important issue, given that Modern Languages students at Oxford read a lot of literature in the language as part of their course. Occasionally candidates are able to give examples of famous lines or quotations that risk being misread when translated into English.
This issue might also be something we discuss when we read an extract or poem in the language together during the interview. Are there new ways of producing sound digital media which have transformed the way we listen or understand sound? What are the different ways in which you listen to music? How does that change the way in which you think about what you're listening to?
Some colleagues play music in the interview and, similarly, ask what your thoughts are about it. The point of all this isn't to find out what you don't know but to get a sense of how you read a text or understand a piece of music, and how you think through issues or material. We are very much aware that the types of music people play and care about are varied and the course itself covers a wide range, from global hip hop to Mozart, medieval song to sound art.
It's not a question, then, of liking the right stuff but of finding out how curious you are, and how well you can apply what you already know to something new. Standalone questions like this one, are more unusual, but suggest the kinds of topics that might be used to prompt discussion. The question allows students to use their own musical experiences as a starting point for a broader and more abstract discussion about the different ways people consume music, the relationship between music and technology, and how music can define us socially.
There might be follow-up questions about whether students think a particular way of listening has more worth the others, for example. It could also prompt other discussions; for example, we tend in Western Europe to be silent in concert halls: why might that be and what is the effect?
Does it encourage a certain kind of attentiveness and respect? Might it put some people off? What would be effect of, say, clapping between movements of a symphony to your understanding of how the music works?
I might also expect to discuss whether particular types of music suit being listened to in particular ways; whether listening on headphones changes the way you experience what's going around you; and what makes some soundtracks better than others.
We are interested in probing their understanding of music and its contexts, so thinking about how you share music with others and how the environment in which you listen to music affects the way you experience it — if you hear the same tracks live, at a festival or concert, what factors change how you hear and think about the music? The study of music is about more than just examining composed works, and a question like this gets at that aspect of the course.
Candidates in my subject come from a wide variety of backgrounds and qualifications, so we generally try to tailor the interview questions to the individual according to what they have on the UCAS form or wrote about in their submitted work, in order to find out whether they have a genuine interest in the subject area and an aptitude for the course.
For this particular question I would be looking for an answer that showed the candidate could appreciate that the Bible was a collection of documents written and transmitted over several centuries, and containing important traditions that have a bearing on history, but that academic study of the Bible means that it has to be examined carefully to see when and where these traditions had come from and for what purpose they had been written.
Whereas they should recognise that archaeology relies on non-literary sources preserved from ancient periods such as the remains of buildings and tools.
These can often be dated by scientific means and so appear more objective than literature , but we still frequently need additional information such as inscriptions or evidence from other similar sites in order to make sense of the ancient remains.
In the end I would hope the candidate would work towards a realisation of the very different nature of these types of evidence, which sometimes gives a complementary picture, while in others it may be contradictory. The same kind of thing applies to archaeology, the Quran, and non-Islamic historical sources for a study of the early Arab conquests. But whether or not I make a given plane journey, the plane will fly anyway.
So there is no moral reason for me not to travel by plane. The interview is not meant to test candidates' knowledge of Philosophy, since more often than not, they have not studied this subject before.
Moreover, we are not trying to get them to guess or arrive at 'the right answer'. Rather, the interview is about candidates' ability to think critically, to deal with counter-examples to the views they put forward, and to draw distinctions between important concepts.
This answer raises the difficult question of individuals' responsibility, as individuals, for harmful collective actions. Whether they are able to do that is in itself an important test, since much of philosophical thinking proceeds in this way. Some candidates might say that the argument is a good one: given that what I do makes no difference, I have no moral reason not to do it. At this point, I would want to know what they consider a moral reason to be as distinct from or similar to, for example, a practical or prudential reason.
I would also push them to think about other cases: for example, the bombing of Dresden one jet fighter less makes no difference to the collective outcome — so why not go and fight ; or voting why should I vote in a general election, given that my vote makes no difference? Are the cases the same? Are they different? If so, are the differences or similarities relevant? That is to say, do those differences and similarities help us think about the original case?
Do they help us to work out a view about individual responsibility in those cases? For example, in the Dresden case, the individual jet fighters act together as part of an organisation — the air force — whose aim is to bomb Dresden. But we cannot say of companies such as British Airways that they aim to cause climate change. And the air passengers cannot really be described as acting together. Does this make a difference?
Suppose that you could plug yourself into a machine for the rest of your life, which would give you all the experiences you find enjoyable and valuable. Once in the machine, you would not know that you are plugged in, and that these experiences are not real. Would you go into the machine? If so, why? If not, why not? Thought-experiments are an important part of doing Philosophy. It invites candidates to think about what makes a life worth living.
Some candidates might be tempted to go into the machine, on the grounds that a good life is a pleasurable life. If so, we would invite them to consider the case of the addict with unlimited supplies of pleasures-inducing drugs. Other candidates might say, on the contrary, that they would not go into the machine, precisely on the grounds that a good life is not merely one in which we experience pleasure. Depending on how they construct their argument, we would try and see what they make of the distinction between what is pleasurable and what is valuable some experiences might be valuable precisely in so far as they are not enjoyable.
In all cases we want them to reflect on whether a good life, for me, is simply what I say it is, or whether a good life must be objectively good.
I quite like this question because whichever way one answers it, new questions open up. One can distinguish between the process of dying and the state of being dead. The first seems non-problematically something that might well be bad for us involving suffering , but the second is harder to assess — not least because one can have differing understandings of what the state of being dead is: is it permanent annihilation? Is it somehow waiting unconscious for a resurrection? Is to die simply to be transported instantaneously to some new realm?
Or is it something else again? And can one know which? Whichever way the discussion goes, interesting topics branch off. These can include the nature of the self and personal identity; the rationality or otherwise of religious beliefs. And wider discussions of the nature of value might open up from there. Questions in practical ethics come up here — to do with euthanasia and the like. Most people have instinctive reactions to these types of questions, answers that feel right to them without argument.
In Philosophy, we are less interested in what that answer or series of answers might be, but how the person developing their thinking justifies it with argument or adapts it in the light of counterargument; how they respond to new considerations — new conceptual distinctions, new evidence, and so on; how or if they spot inconsistencies or growing implausibility as their series of answers and ideas develop, or bonds of mutual support between their answers and ideas.
Why is income per head between 50 and times larger in the United States than in countries such as Burundi and Malawi? The question is focused on perhaps the most important economic question there is: why are some countries rich and some countries poor?
As with most economics questions, there is no simple or unique answer. Candidates need to think about all the potential reasons why such income gaps exist. A good starting point is to think about whether the amount of capital and technology available to workers in different countries is the same and if not, why not?
US workers are much more productive because they have access to the best technology - the US is at the technological frontier. But why do poor countries not just buy the same technology and be as productive?
Possibly, the education levels are too low to allow for the use of such technology or perhaps there are insufficient savings to purchase the technology or the infrastructure might not exist. Good candidates should recognise that institutions matter a lot - respect for property rights and the rule of law appear to be pre-requisites for sustainable development. Other factors might include trade restrictions by the rich world on poor countries exports, civil wars, disease eg AIDS, malaria etc.
The trick is to think widely and not try and fit the answer to some lesson that has been learnt in school. When I was at school in the s, there was talk of a pensions crisis that would one day hit.
The talk persisted in the s, and the s — and then there was a pensions crisis, and little had been done politically to prepare us for it. Is there a fault with the British political system that means we can't sensibly address serious medium and long-term problems when they are identified? This question was an invitation to think about democracy and its limitations — it's a big question, but an important one.
I have had candidates come up with good discussions about voting methods — for example, how having proportions of parliament voted in for much longer terms might promote more long-term policy thinking. Another approach might be to reflect on the responsibility of the electorate; if they do not think in long-term ways, it may not be politicians who are to blame, and the problem may be down to education.
One might reflect upon the importance of having an unelected second chamber to which all really important business could be delegated. One candidate suggested that no one should be allowed to stand for parliament unless they have dependent children, with the thought that this would ensure a personal motivation towards longer term thinking on a variety of matters.
There is no single 'right answer' to the question; most answers given serve as the basis for further elaboration. For example, in the case of longer parliamentary terms: What would be the wider consequences of that change?
Would they be desirable? We are testing the capacity to begin to locate the source of a problem, and try out solutions through discussion. The precise solution students suggest matters much less than evidence of the refining of ideas and of self-correction where necessary. I'm having trouble with the meaning of three words: Lie, Deceive, Mislead. They seem to mean something a bit similar, but not exactly the same.
Help me to sort them out from each other. When I used this question, candidates adopted a number of strategies. One was to provide definitions of each of them - which turned out to be less easy than one might think without using the other words in the definition.
Or they could be contrasted in pairs, or, like a good dictionary, examples might be given of sentences where they are used. No particular strategy was 'correct', and a variety of interesting discussions developed. A few candidates were inclined to think that it might be possible to lie without intending to; most reckoned that one could unintentionally mislead.
A fertile line of discussion centred on misleading someone by telling them the truth. When Lucy tries to console Mr Tumnus, the faun, in Narnia, she tells him that he is 'the nicest faun I've ever met'. Which does sound comforting. She's only ever met one faun, though - him - so he's also the nastiest faun she's ever met. If he had felt comforted by her remark, would he have been deceived?
And, in saying something true, had she deceived him, or had he deceived himself? Questions of this sort help us to test a candidate's capacity to draw nuanced distinctions between concepts, and to revise and challenge their own first moves in the light of different sentences containing the key words.
Discussion may well lead into areas which could crop up during a degree in philosophy, including questions in ethics, the philosophy of mind and of language. It's not, though, a test of 'philosophical knowledge', and the content of the discussion begins from words which candidates should have a good familiarity with.
Until asked this question, they would probably think that they knew their meanings pretty well. Those for whom English isn't a first language might be thought to be at a disadvantage, but they often do strikingly well at such questions, better indeed than native speakers. There may well be reasons for this, which could form the basis of a different interview question. Obviously the notion of blame is an important one in moral theory but insofar as blame is an emotional attitude it also brings in issues in the philosophy of mind.
Debates about the nature of blame are going on right now in philosophy so the question is also partly a prompt for doing some philosophy together -- which is exactly what we hope to achieve in a tutorial.
So, for example, many candidates start out by suggesting that for A to blame B, A would have to think that B had done something wrong.
We can use this opening suggestion to consider a simple theory of blame: blame is just thinking that someone has done something wrong. When this is put to candidates, most recognize that blame seems to involve more than this. Candidates will then be encouraged to offer and test-out more sophisticated proposals about the nature of blame.
Some might suggest that blame involves a more complex judgement than just that someone has done something wrong. Others instead might argue that real blame requires feelings of some kind on the part of the blamer: anger, or resentment, for example. And again we can put these proposals to the test by looking for counter-examples. A ball, initially at rest, is pushed upwards by a constant force for a certain amount of time. Sketch the velocity of the ball as a function of time, from start to when it hits the ground.
Physics interview questions often start with a question like this which looks as though it could have come from the Physics Admissions Test.
It's not assumed that a less-talented student will need more help on any given problem, and for this reason it can be difficult for students to judge how well they're doing during the interview.
If a student gets things correct straight away, I just move on, either to further aspects of the original question, or to others. For instance, the above line of questioning could easily result in a discussion of satellites, orbits, weightlessness or dark matter. It's usually a guided discussion rather than a matter of getting answers right or wrong straight away. I want to see how students respond to guidance and how they correct themselves, hopefully less by guessing than by thinking through what they know and what I've told them.
Or in other words, while I am looking for a correct answer in the end, I'm even more interested in rigorous thinking. A large study appears to show that older siblings consistently score higher than younger siblings on IQ tests. Why would this be? This is a question that really asks students to think about lots of different aspects of psychology, and we guide students when discussing it to think about both scientific factors such as maternal age mothers are older when younger siblings are born - could that play a role?
This can lead them to think about what the dynamics of being an older sibling might be that produce such an effect - they might suggest that having more undivided parental attention in the years before a sibling comes along makes a difference, for example.
Eventually most students arrive at the conclusion that being an older sibling and having to teach a younger sibling certain skills and types of knowledge benefits their own cognitive skills learning things twice, in effect.
What we are interested in is the kinds of reasoning students use and the questions they ask about the study - what it takes into account, what it might not — that tells us about their suitability for the course. Each person has to choose a number between 0 and What number will you choose, and why? I like this as a question for Experimental Psychology because answering it brings in a range of skills relevant to the subject. In this case, everyone else would have to choose , which is unlikely.
At this point, I'd ask questions that bring out the candidate's broader reasoning skills in terms of thinking how we could define what it is rational to do in this game. Game theory gives one definition of rationality, but does it give a plausible winning answer — that is, is it likely that everyone, all of them, will go through exactly the thought process we've just described? If not, is 0 really a rational answer?
The question also has a psychological angle in thinking about reasons for people's behaviour and choices: Will everyone put in the same effort? Will everyone be motivated to win? When I've used this question in live audiences, sometimes people say they'd pick the number just because it'd throw a spanner in the works for everyone playing the game rationally. How should this affect your choice of answer?
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