Урок "Tastes Differ or the Question of Image"

Read and guess the meaning.

image  appetizing   ripe   pour   sound effect

sizzle  percolate  associate  tap  jar  claim

HOW TO SELL FOOD: THE QUESTION OF IMAGE

 Advertising is about creating images, and this is especially true when advertising food and drink. What the food looks like is more important than what it tastes like.

To sell food successfully, it must look appetizing. Milk must look cold, bread must look freshly-baked, fruit must look ripe and juicy. Television advertising of food often uses movement. Apparently, food looks especially appetizing if it moves. Chocolate sauce looks more delicious when you see it being poured over ice cream than if it is in a jug.

Sound effects - but not background music - also help to sell food: sausages sizzling in a frying pan are mouth-watering. A TV advertisement for a brand of coffee had the sound of coffee percolating in the background. The advertisement was so successful that it lasted five years.

The colour of food and the colour of packaging is also very important. If the colour of the food looks wrong, people won't eat it because they associate food with certain colours. Nobody would seriously eat blue bread or drink blue beer. Other unpopular food colours are purple, grey and in some cases, white.

 How people expect something to taste often influences how it actually does taste. Researchers gave some mineral water to two groups of people. They told one group that the water was mineral water and asked: 'What does it taste like?' The answer was: 'It tastes nice.' Then the researchers told the other group that the mineral water was tap water. This second group said the water tasted a bit strange and not very nice. The word 'tap' created an unpleasant image of chlorine.

It is the same with packaging. A food manufacturer was trying to decide whether to sell his product in a glass jar or a can. He gave a group of people the same product in both a glass jar and a can, and asked them to taste it. They all claimed that the product in the glass jar tasted better.

So it seems to be true, image is everything.

Choose the right answer.

1 It helps to advertise food if you have

1. background music.
2. sound effects of food.
3. percolating coffee in the background.

2 In an experiment, the people who said their water didn't taste nice were tasting

1. mineral water.
2. tap water.
3. chlorinated water.

3 The people in the glass jar and can experiment were tasting

1. the same product.
2. different products.

GRAMMAR FOCUS: Stative verbs

Adjectives can be used after certain stative verbs e.g. sound, look, feel, taste, smell, seem. These verbs can also be combined with like to compare things.

Verb + adjective

He sounds nice.

It tastes disgusting.

It feels good.

She seems tired.

Verb + like

This music sounds like Mozart.

This man looks like you.

This room feels like home.

This meat tastes like chicken.

It smells like fish.

It seems like a year since I saw you.

Question    Answer

What does it look like?  It looks like meat.

How does it smell?  It smells fishy.