English Skills with Readings 8th Edition by John Langan

Exercise 41

Underline the three illustration signals in the following selection.
Status symbols are all around us. The cars we drive, for instance, say something about who we are and how successful we have been. The auto makers depend on this perception of automobiles, designing their com­mercials to show older, well-established people driving luxury sedans and young, fun-loving people driving to the beach in sports cars. Clothing, too, has always been a status symbol. Specifically, schoolchildren are often rated by their classmates according to the brand names of their clothing. Another example of a status symbol is the cell phone. This device, not so long ago considered a novelty, is now used by almost everyone. Being without a cell phone in the twenty-first century is like being without a regular phone in the 1990s.