This study investigated the use of the amplifier very in high school English textbooks and native corpora by comparing its frequency distributions and collocation patterns. The native corpora, used as the reference of the study, were COCA and BNC, with their built-in sub-corpora further grouped into spoken and written corpora. The High School English Textbook Corpus (HSETC) was compiled from a total of 53 high school textbooks, with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S) from the texts in listening and conversation and the written corpus (HSETC-W) from the reading passages. Analyses using AntConc3.4.4 revealed no prominent differences between HSETC and reference corpora in the frequency of the amplifier very, while the written corpus (HSETC-W) had more occurrences contrary to the native corpora. The combination patterns and their occurrences of HSETC were slightly different from those of COCA and BNC with the gap increased with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S). Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made on ELT materials development and teaching practices.

Deoxynivalenol (DON) and zearalenone (ZEN) are mainly contaminated mycotoxins in feeds. The study was carried out to analyze and survey the contamination of DON and ZEN in one hundred thirteen samples of feeds. After cleaning all samples with immunoaffinity column, the mycotoxins were analysed by using high performance liquid chromatography/fluorescence with diode array detector (HPLC /FLD with DAD). The average recoveries of DON were 88.76 and 95.40% at the levels of 200 and 1,000 μg/kg and 87.09 and 98.40% of ZEN were recovered at the levels of 100 and 500 μg/kg, respectively. The limit of detection (LOD) were 6.0 and 3.0 μg/kg for DON and ZEN, respectively. The average concentrations of DON were 372.1, 324.0 and 990.9 μg/kg in chicken, pig and cattle feed, respectively. Those of ZEN were 76.1, 43.7 and 196.2 μg/kg for them, individually.