Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Selective   /səlˈɛktɪv/   Listen
Selective

adjective
1.
Tending to select; characterized by careful choice.
2.
Characterized by very careful or fastidious selection.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Selective" Quotes from Famous Books



... stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the future ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... used afterward to move the world with. In proportion as they have moved the world, they are found to have kept the lead in their education from their earliest years, to have had a habit of initiative as well as hospitality, to have maintained a creative, selective, active attitude toward all persons and toward all books that have been brought within range of ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... slays. It was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest, a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals above the average. Lord Salisbury was no doubt misled, as most people who share his mistake have been misled, by the grammatical error of employing the Survival of the Fittest for the Survival of the Fitter, in order to escape a scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... diffusion of persistent pollutants like pesticides, or to avert the possibility of disastrous spills. Public education and wiser restrictive legislation may help, but the only real hope in terms of these poisons appears to be that more selective and less indestructible substitutes will be found, and all promising means of biological pest control explored. Continuing programs are focused on the problem, but it ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... about the time he should have been rubbing the velvet off his horns among the junipers of the high ridges, the mule-deer came back with two of his companions and fattened on the fruit of the vineyard. They went up and down the rows ruining with selective bites the finest clusters. During the day they lay up like cattle under the quaking aspens beyond the highest, wind-whitened spay of the chaparral, and came down to feast day by day as the sun ripened ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... want cut and dry rules must go to their Scriptures for them, and even then, as the rules in the Scriptures are contradictory—both as between Scriptures and within any given Scripture—they must call in the help of Intuition and Utility in the making of their code, in their selective process. This selective process will be largely moulded by the public opinion of their country and age, emphasising some precepts and ignoring others, and the code will be the expression of the average morality of the time. If this clumsy and uncertain fashion of finding ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant

... use of the imagination we may hope to penetrate this mystery. The cloud takes no note of size on the part of the waves of aether, but reflects them all alike. It exercises no selective action. Now the cause of this may be that the cloud particles are so large, in comparison with the waves of aether, as to reflect them all indifferently. A broad cliff reflects an Atlantic roller as easily as a ripple ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... volume is to be devoted to the work, any bibliography of the history of the Negro Problem in the United States must be selective. No comprehensive work is in existence. Importance attaches to Select List of References on the Negro Question, compiled under the direction of A.P.C. Griffin, Library of Congress, Washington, 1903; A Select Bibliography of the Negro ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... dispersion by our atmosphere, together with selective absorption, also by our atmosphere and its vapors, have been suggested as causes in this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various

... the masculine, who are evidently so by nature. Is it these women, already predestined for something other than distinctive womanhood, that offer themselves for "higher education"? In other words, is there a selective process at work, the results of which in choosing a certain type of woman we attribute to the education undergone? If we answer this question wrongly, and act upon our erroneous interpretation, we shall certainly do grave ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... development of a function in offspring begins at the point where it began in his parents, not at the point where it ended in them. Biological improvement of the race (and such improvement greatly fosters all other kinds) must be made through a selective birth-rate. There is no short-cut by way of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... long fingers through her own bronze-flecked ringlets. Selective breeding this, with a vengeance, I thought; an ancient experiment in heredity which of course would in time result in the stamping out of the tendency to depart from type that lies in all organisms; resulting, obviously, at last, in three fixed forms of black-haired, ruddy-haired, and silver-haired—but ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... This passage, and a similar discussion on the power of the Creator (p. 6), correspond to the comparison between the selective capacities of man and nature, in the Origin, Ed. i. p. 83, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... newspapers of Berlin and elsewhere that the passage of the American conscription law had been followed by rioting and rebellion in many places and that fully fifty per cent of the American people was opposed to the declaration of war. The fact that the selective service act passed in May, 1917, was accepted by everybody in this country as a wholly equitable and satisfactory law did not permeate into Germany until the first American Expeditionary Force ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... switches. As Ross flicked up the first the pattern on the screen dwindled into a brown color shot with cream in which there was a suggestion of a picture. Suppose one didn't put the switch all the way up? Ross examined the slot in which the bar moved and now noted a series of tiny point marks along it. Selective? It would not do any harm to see. First he hurried back to the cork of chairs he had jammed into the stairwell. The squawks were now coming only at intervals, and Ross could hear nothing to suggest that his barrier was ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... in the seventh essay, the fact of evolution is to my mind sufficiently evidenced by palaeontology; and I remain of the opinion expressed in the second, that until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation; the apparent inheritance of acquired characters ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... be born to preferment and others to ignominy in order that the race may progress, is cruel and sad; but none the less they are so born. The weeding out of human souls, some for fatness and smiles, some for leanness and tears, is surely a heartless selective process—as heartless as it is natural. And the human family, for all its wonderful record of adventure and achievement, has not yet succeeded in avoiding this process. That it is incapable of doing ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... owes a debt of gratitude to the Selective Service boards. The successful operation of the Selective Service System and the way it has been accepted by the great mass of our citizens give us confidence that if necessary, the same principle could be used to solve any ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... term 'natural selection' is overlooked when people talk glibly about 'natural selection' of ideas. Darwin used the term 'natural selection' because he thought he saw an analogy between the tendency of nature and the selective purposes of intelligent beings. It was because nature, working without intelligence, produced the same kind of result as man does by intelligent selection, that he ventured to use this term 'selection' of the process of nature. Perhaps he was hardly justified in adopting the term, ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... characteristics are actually racial, that is, biological, and to what extent they are the effect of environmental conditions. The thesis of this paper, to state it again, is: (1) That fundamental temperamental qualities, which are the basis of interest and attention, act as selective agencies and as such determine what elements in the cultural environment each race will select, in what region it will seek and find its vocation, in the larger social organization; (2) that, on the other hand, technique, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... (173) This selective mental process is helped by the score described in the last chapter; and the quantity of each color chosen for the group is easily indicated by a variable circle, drawn round the various points on the diagram. Thus, in the case of ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... of the Relevant Forum: the Library's Collection as a Whole or the Provision of Internet Access? C. Content-based Restrictions in Designated Public Fora D. Reasons for Applying Strict Scrutiny 1. Selective Exclusion From a "Vast Democratic Forum" 2. Analogy to Traditional Public Fora V. Application of Strict Scrutiny A. State Interests 1. Preventing the Dissemination of Obscenity, Child Pornography, ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... emotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been obscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body on the soul and of ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... restored. While we know nothing of the forces which determine, on the one hand, what elements shall be discarded by the germinal cells and, on the other hand, what elements shall remain, it is definitely proved that a selective process always takes place. This fact admirably explains the variation in the characteristics inherited by children of the same family. So far as is known, the traits which will be passed on from either parent are a matter of chance. Whatever these hereditary ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons



Words linked to "Selective" :   select, discriminating, selectivity, exclusive



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com