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What is "selective"

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selective
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
selective
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
▪ It is inevitably highly selective, both in the Acts it covers and in what it includes from each Act.
▪ But memory is highly selective, particularly within an organization that has weathered numerous crises and moments of extreme duress.
▪ Perhaps it is Upjohn that is being highly selective regarding evidence on serious psychiatric reactions to triazolam.
▪ These leaders need to recognize the need to be highly selective about what to incorporate into their operations.
▪ What an animal learns is highly selective and highly ordered.
▪ The virus proved highly selective in killing several lines of human cancer cells in laboratory cell cultures.
▪ In any event, we are highly selective about blanket sanctions.
▪ Compatibility is crucial, so the process is highly selective.
more
▪ A more selective approach to underwriting Commercial motor business has also been adopted following adverse experience on major fleets.
▪ The managers reported that firing a subordinate taught them to be even more selective in hiring.
▪ This means they must actively encourage a more selective approach to custodial remand and sentencing.
▪ Sales may also be lost because the aggressive firm is more selective in granting credit than its competitors.
▪ At the very least it was more selective than various predecessors which by that time had fallen into disrepute.
▪ It was somewhat sobering to have all these things go wrong at once, and I decided to become more selective.
▪ The answers were more selective recruitment and yet more discipline.
▪ One consequence of this lumpiness is that caffeine is far more selective in its actions than is alcohol.
very
▪ These apply very selective filtration of unwanted audio frequencies.
▪ The Legion was being selective. Very selective.
▪ Mushtaq, one of his four cricketing brothers, remembers' a reserved young man, very selective with friends.
▪ They need strong headlines and very selective copy.
■ NOUN
assessment
▪ Information may be gathered in a variety of ways, including the use of functional assessment instruments and selective assessment forms.
▪ In both cases the assessment task can be identified as that of correctly selecting individuals, i.e. selective assessment.
▪ In selective assessment the relationship between practitioner and elder is one of unequal power.
▪ Anxiety, anger or apathy all seem reasonable defensive strategies for elders to adopt when facing selective assessment now.
▪ Yet there are arguable benefits from practising selective assessment.
▪ Indeed, equal opportunity policies, and strategies of affirmative action, can be built into selective assessments.
▪ Nevertheless, there are obvious limitations to a system of selective assessment.
assistance
▪ One option would be to increase the £120m regional selective assistance budget, channelled into businesses in struggling areas.
▪ A large number of smaller companies there have been receiving regional selective assistance since the middle 1980s.
▪ Regional selective assistance is equal wherever it is applied for in Great Britain, although the limits for Northern Ireland are higher.
▪ Regional selective assistance remains the main regional programme for industry.
▪ For example, regional aid and selective assistance have been dramatically cut.
▪ I can quote some of the figures on the cuts in regional selective assistance in the period in question.
▪ Tens of thousands of jobs are created each year by regional selective assistance.
▪ She said that large cuts were made in regional selective assistance in the early 1980s.
attention
▪ This explanation of sleep loss effects in terms of lowered arousal is further supported by studies on selective attention.
▪ They co-opt the selective attention circuitry.
▪ Certainly this frontal lobe role in adaptive behavior is linked to the mechanisms of selective attention.
breeding
▪ Among its aims is a new eugenics: selective breeding.
▪ The culmination of years of selective breeding - Richard Tisbury releases a Sanke.
▪ The selective breeding techniques used became blueprints for other breeders and ensured that the Shorthorn quickly ousted Bakewell's then ubiquitous Longhorn.
▪ At Cheltenham Town Hall ... on show the results of years of selective breeding and careful nurturing.
▪ These initial reflections did not include, then, any analogy between artificially and naturally selective breeding.
forces
▪ What mix of selective forces and developmental constraints moulded the mandible, honed the teeth?
▪ Hence selective forces would have favoured the most successful at doing it.
incentive
▪ Some groups able to overcome free-riding by arranging selective incentives for their members will be powerfully organized to achieve their goals.
▪ As selective incentives are only available to group members, they are not estimated in the way in which collective benefits are.
▪ The organizational elite will be able to use the selective incentives to achieve broader, collective goods.
memory
▪ But looking back, we seem to have a selective memory for the best bits of the past.
▪ But selective memory can be a dangerous thing.
▪ Being a Madonna devotee has always involved having a selective memory.
▪ This general type of bias may be due to a selective memory search for information favouring a positive personal outcome.
pressure
▪ Also left are useful fruit trees, which are thus under selective pressures.
▪ The selective pressure is on all pathogens to mimic the passwords of their hosts.
▪ Such use is already providing selective pressure to the emergence of resistance.
▪ The selective pressure is on all hosts to keep changing the password.
▪ For selective pressures for linguistic ability could easily reverse in ontogeny the order I maintain would be needed in phylogeny.
school
▪ If governors back the move, the school will be the last selective school in the county to seek Grant Maintained Status.
▪ The best students, who attended one of the few selective schools, received the equivalent of a high-quality prep school education.
use
▪ The sporadic shutting off of town centres by selective use of barriers is already under way to stop the bombers.
▪ But selective use of television can make for a healthy ritual for connection with your spouse.
▪ A project to develop a new production process requires a similar selective use of the concept.
▪ But individual nations also have recourse to the selective use of various devices for bending the rules of international free trade.
vagotomy
▪ Highly selective vagotomy was introduced about 20 years ago and hence any cancer risk should become apparent in the next few years.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ People are becoming more and more selective about the food they eat these days.
▪ the selective breeding of horses
▪ You've got to be very selective when choosing a roommate.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A project to develop a new production process requires a similar selective use of the concept.
▪ All colleges were selective at the time.
▪ By 1980 no detail of animal courtship mattered unless it could be explained in terms of the selective competition of genes.
▪ Do they signal selective enforcement against minorities?
▪ It is inevitably highly selective, both in the Acts it covers and in what it includes from each Act.
▪ The unit we offered was very brief, and, of necessity, highly selective.
▪ Those conditions drew selective buying of defensive stocks.
▪ We also learned to be selective, that too many unusual pieces defeat the impact of individuality.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Selective

Selective \Se*lect"ive\, a. Selecting; tending to select.

This selective providence of the Almighty.
--Bp. Hall.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
selective

1620s; see select (adj.) + -ive. Related: Selectively; selectiveness. Selective service is from 1917, American English.

Wiktionary
selective

a. 1 Of or pertaining to the process of selection.(rfex) 2 (context of a person English) choosy, fussy or discriminating when selecting. 3 (context chiefly US not comparable English) Having the authority or capability to make a selection.

Related phrases:
WordNet
selective

  1. adj. tending to select; characterized by careful choice; "an exceptionally quick and selective reader"- John Mason Brown

  2. characterized by very careful or fastidious selection; "the school was very selective in its admissions"

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Selective

Selective may refer to:

  • Selective Insurance, an American insurance company
  • Selective school, a school that admits students on the basis of some sort of selection criteria
    • Selective school (New South Wales)
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "selective".

Programs on supersonic reaction initiation, free radical mechanisms, photocatalysis, and selective adsorption would be quietly, even surreptitiously, phased out.

Meeting his eyes, which were wide-set and had the brackeny brightness of well-water in the sun, she recognised there the real significance of her own selective behaviour.

Men had gone mad, in these first minutes following decarbonization, hopelessly, utterly madunable ever again to reorganize the ten-billion individual images that comprised a lifespan into any kind of coherent, selective order.

He worked exclusively with the so-called junk DNA in rats, introducing a selective catalyst through the cell wall on a folic acid carrier to delete specific but unimportant nucleotides.

The unique heterocyclic structure of the tetrodotoxin molecule is selective for the sodium channels.

Judeo-Christian religion was scrapped along with all the others, His Goldness I freed mankind from muddlement and slavery by designing the Code Complex, popularly called the Prism, as it is where every human is coded at birth and conditioned through selective and deprivational feeding of body and mind toward his ultimate use in the world.

Judeo Christian religion was scrapped along with all the others, His Goldness I freed mankind from muddlement and slavery by designing the Code Complex, popularly called the Prism, as it is where every human is coded at birth and conditioned through selective and deprivational feeding of body and mind toward his ultimate use in the world.

Just about the time she outgrew the unpleasant chore of kissing her New England aunts and grandmothers, and could get a little selective in her osculation, she married me and moved to New Mexico, where, she discovered to her horror, it was her social duty to take on all corners.

The benefits of perceiving this information have provided the selective pressure that has driven the evolution of the ability to perceive musicality.

It does indeed seem to me, however, that you do have psychogenic, selective, retrograde amnesia, the variety temporarily induced by the blanking process.

This volume, therefore, while the most comprehensive dissertation yet published on modern science fiction and the authors who create it, is essentially selective.

General Blitzkrieg had hit something over a hundred balls, but by incredibly selective scorekeeping, had managed to put only forty-two strokes down on his scorecard.

Rational despotism--that is, selective despotism--is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all.

But here the selective influence of predation would be, if anything, in the direction of making the cries quieter.

Instead of wreaking wholesale havoc on the roster, I concluded we could make selective changes.