Skimming is the quick reading approach used to grasp the overall meaning of a text. When you skim, you move through rapidly, focusing on features that signal the main idea—titles and headings, topic sentences, opening and closing paragraphs, and any concluding ideas. The goal is to get a sense of what the text is about, its purpose, and its general structure without reading every word. This makes it a handy first step to decide whether to read more closely or to extract a gist quickly for study or planning. In contrast, scanning is about locating specific details once you know the text might contain them; context refers to the surrounding text that helps interpret a term or idea; audience means the intended reader for whom the text is written.

Evaluative lexis is about language that shows a speaker’s or writer’s judgment or attitude toward what they’re describing. Words like clearly or this is a very effective method signal a stance, guiding the reader to view the situation in a particular light and often shaping persuasion or bias. This type of wording reveals how the writer feels about the topic, beyond simply stating facts. The other ideas describe who is telling the story or how reliable they are, not the words used to express judgment. A limited narrator refers to a restricted point of view in the narrative, while a fallible narrator highlights unreliability in the teller. Inferring or inferring something is a reading action, not a feature of the language used to express judgment. So the term that best fits the description of expressing personal appraisal through specific words is evaluative lexis.

Specialized language used by a profession or group that others struggle to understand is called jargon. It includes technical terms, abbreviations, and shorthand that insiders use to communicate efficiently. This question points to that exact idea—a word in everyday use wouldn’t capture the sense of a whole set of terms tied to a field, so jargon is the best fit. For example, in medicine you might hear terms like hypertension or ECG, which aren’t part of everyday vocabulary. Anecdote refers to a short personal story, not a type of language. Less common lexis simply means uncommon vocabulary in general, not necessarily tied to a specific profession. A list of three is unrelated to language at all.

Lexical field is a set of words that belong to the same topic and share related meanings. It’s about how writers pick vocabulary within a domain and how those words connect semantically. The best statement captures this by saying it relates to word choices within a domain and its semantic connections. For example, when a writer talks about the sea, they might use terms like tide, harbor, ship, buoy, and reef—not because they are all exact synonyms, but because they belong to the same topic and relate in meaning, creating a cohesive field. Other options miss the mark because they focus on aspects outside meaning and topic. Using only synonyms is too narrow—lexical field includes related terms that aren’t strict synonyms. Phonology deals with sounds, not the semantic connections between words in a topic. Metaphor across texts is a stylistic device that can involve many fields, but it isn’t what defines a lexical field.

Semantic shift is when a word’s sense changes as language evolves over time. For example, awful once meant something awe-inspiring or worthy of reverence, a positive sense. Today it typically means terrible or very bad. This kind of change shows how attitudes and usage shift the meaning attached to a word, sometimes moving toward the negative (pejoration) or the opposite (amelioration). The other ideas describe different linguistic phenomena: changing how a word is spelled relates to spelling/orthography rather than meaning; the distinction between denotation and connotation is about literal meaning versus associations, not how meanings drift over time; and using a metaphor is a figure of speech, not a historical shift in meaning.