When I read paragraph one, the first sentence interested me. In this sentence, what is the meaning of “in their own immunity to advertising”? In my opinion, it means they can escape the inference of advertising or that everything is under their control. From this paragraph, the author expresses that many people believe that the advertising is just playing a minor supporting role in their life.
Paragraph two shows the advertisers’ view. According to what Paragraph one refers, the advertisers express another opinion, which says that people can be more or less affected by advertising, even the ones who claim immunity to the advertising, especially when the advertising is well-designed. in the middle of the paragraph, “below the level of conscious awareness” means unconsciously, which refers to that “people don’t aware that the things are quietly happening.” And the phrase “all but” means “all except”.
When I read the third paragraph, I found one sentence is very difficult to be understood. The sentence is “Advertisers delight in an audience that believes ads to be harmless nonsense, for such an audience is rendered defenseless by its belief that there is no attack taking place.” I looked up the new words and read it for several times. Finally, I know its structure. The main clause is “advertisers delight in an audience”. “that believes ads to be harmless nonsense” is a adjective clause. “for such an audience is rendered defenseless by its belief that there is no attack taking place” is a adverbial clause, which is expressing the reason why advertisers like such audience.
Paragraph four is talking about the “claim”, which refers to the words of advertises, such as the slogans. In this paragraph, the word “downright” attracts my attention, which is made up with two single words “down” and “right”, so if the meaning of “downright” has some relations with these two words? I consulted the dictionary, in which it says its meaning is “extremely or very great”, and usually it is used to modify something bad. When I read the last sentence, I found there is a little difficulty. I wondered what’s the meaning of “balance on the narrow line” and why does the author say that? If it means the question that ‘is the claims truth or falsehood’ is hard to answer? I think so.
The fifth paragraph is expressing the reason of why so many ad claims fall into the category of false information. The reason is that most of the brands are nearly identical between parity products, so they all use claims to create the illusion of superiority. When such claims prevailing, people will feel the claims are falsehood.
In Paragraph six, “Alice-in-WONDERLAND” means preposterous, which comes from the work “Alice in Wonderland” written by English writer, Lewis Carroll. The book is full of words which have absurd meanings, in which the use of “better” means “best” but “best” only means “equal to”. The case of “minute maid Orange Juice” is just explaining this point of view. It is one rule of advertising claims.
The second rule is referred in Paragraph seven, which isif a product is truly superior, the ad will say so very clearly and will offer some kind of convincing evidence of the superiority. If not, we can strongly suspect it is not superior. The author takes the gasoline as an example. The gasoline is a product that almost all the brands are equal; no one will be the superiority.
The eighth paragraph is the bedding for the next paragraphs. It refers six basic techniques in creating the illusion of superiority. In this paragraph, the phrase “resort to” means to use something to help, because we can not find any other way of acting.
