听力文本如下:
Then Hannah says, “As you can see across this row and down this column, Vision Corporation's current product offering includes only one of the top three most desired features.”
A couple of terms here that are important in explaining visuals, especially for a table.
A table has rows and columns.
A “row” (row) is one horizontal (or side-to-side) line in a table; it goes across from left to right.
A “column” (column) is a line that goes from top to bottom, a vertical line.
So, a table has sections that go across (horizontally) and up and down (vertically), and this, of course, makes a square or a rectangle.
You can think of these as little boxes, and there are boxes that go horizontally (in a row) and go vertically (in a column).
When you look at a television schedule, for example, usually the row are the different television channels, and the columns lists the shows at different times during the day.
Hannah says that they asked the participants to rank the products offered by Vision Corporation.
“To rank” means to give a number to each thing in a list to show or indicate its importance.
In some restaurants for example, the waiter may give you a piece of paper and ask you to rank the food and services from one (meaning very poor) to five (meaning excellent).
This is something you would find at a not very expensive restaurant.
For example, in the United States, they sometimes ask for your opinion; they ask you to rank - to put things in order from most important to least important.
The focus group participants were asked to rank Vision Corporation's product against those of the top four competitors, meaning they were asked to rank five different products, one from each of the five companies, and say which one was best, which one was second best, third best, fourth best, and then worst, or fifth.