Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

Simply being bilingual doesn’t qualify someone to interpret. Interpreting is not only a mechanical process of converting one sentence in language A into the same sentence in language B. Rather, it’s a complex art in which thoughts and idioms that have no obvious counterparts from tongue to tongue _ or words that have several meanings must be quickly transformed in such a way that the message is clearly and accurately expressed to the listener.

At one international conference, an American speaker said, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear”, which meant nothing to the Spanish audience. The interpretation was, “A monkey in a silk dress is still a monkey” - an idiom the Spanish understood and that expressed the same idea.

There are 2 kinds of interpreters, simultaneous and consecutive. The former, sitting in a separated booth, usually at a large multilingual conference, speaks to listeners wearing headphones, interpreting what a foreign language speaker says actually a sentence behind. Consecutive interpreters are the ones most international negotiations use. They are employed for smaller meetings without sound booths and headphones. Consecutive interpretation also requires two-person teams. A foreign speaker says his piece while the interpreter, using a special shorthand, takes notes and during a pause, tells the client what was said

The word “rather” is closest in meaning to _________.