My students found the following two questions difficult, mainly because of some of the vocabulary used by the speaker.
1. Joanna concentrated on women performers because
A) women are more influenced by fashion.
B) women's dress has led to more controversy.
C) women's code of dress is less strict than men's.
2. Frost's article suggests that in popular music, women's dress is affected by
A) their wish to be taken seriously.
B) their tendency to copy each other.
C) their reaction to the masculine nature of the music.
Here's a transcript of the recording:
You only had women performers in your study. Was that because male musicians are less worried about fashion?
I think a lot of the men are very much influenced by fashion, but in social terms the choices they have are more limited... they'd really upset audiences if they strayed away from quite narrow boundaries.
Frost points out that a lot of female singers and musicians in popular music tend to dress down in performances, and wear less feminine clothes, like jeans instead of skirts, and he suggests this is because otherwise they'd just be discounted as trivial.
Which answer would you choose for each question? Can you explain the meaning of the words that I've underlined above?