TOEFL iBT Integrated Writing Task

Reading passage
The English word acronym comes from the Greek words ‘akros’ meaning ‘topmost’ and ‘onoma’ meaning ‘name’. An acronym is a special type of abbreviation, or shortened word, in which the initial letters of words or word parts are read as a new word or phrase. A good example of this is the word laser which is a shortened form of Light Amplification and Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Another example is NATO, formed from the words North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

There is some disagreement as to what exactly an acronym is. Some people think that acronym covers all expressions in which the initial letter or part of a word is used, regardless of whether it can be pronounced as a word, or as a combination of letters. To these people not only would JAL (Japan Airlines) and Todai (a Japanese acronym combining the first parts of the words for Tokyo University) be acronyms, but also NHK (Nihon Hoso Kyokai, the Japanese public TV channel) and CNN (Cable News Network): the latter two being pronounced as a series of individual letters.

Other people believe that acronyms can only be groups of letters or word parts that are pronounced as a word. Those who think this way would not call CNN an acronym; they would call it an initialism or alphabetism.

To further confuse the issue, there is a third group of words that combine the qualities of both acronyms and initialisms. If we consider the expressions spelt JPEG (pronounced jay-peg, a kind of internet image file), and MS-DOS (pronounced em ess doss, the original Windows operating system), we can see that they are partly read as an individual letter and partly as a word. The terms are often called acronym-initialism hybrids. (287 words)

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