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A settlement agreement is a legally binding contract in which an employee agrees to waive their right to bring claims against the employer, usually in exchange for a payment. It was formerly called a
The difference determines whether you receive notice — and therefore whether a dismissal is summary. Misconduct is behaviour falling short of expected standards but not so serious as to destroy the
A 360-degree review collects feedback on someone from multiple perspectives — manager, peers, direct reports and sometimes clients — rather than from a line manager alone. The name describes the full
They provide different things, and the one most people ask for is not the one that most affects careers. A mentor shares experience and advice. Usually someone more senior or further along, in a
TUPE — the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations — protects employees when the business they work for changes hands. Its central effect is that your employment transfers
A zero-hours contract is an arrangement with no guaranteed minimum hours. The employer offers work when available; how much obligation exists on either side depends on the contract's terms. The two
An assessment centre is a structured selection event, usually half a day to two days, where candidates complete several different exercises while being observed by trained assessors. It is common for
Psychometric tests are standardised assessments measuring cognitive ability or personality traits, used to compare candidates on a consistent basis rather than on interview impressions. The two broad
The critical question with all of them is who pays them, because that determines whose interests they serve — and in almost every case, it is not you. Internal (in-house) recruiter. Employed by the
Through a structured process designed to produce consistency across many markers, which is a harder problem than marking accuracy itself. The mark scheme. Written alongside the paper, it specifies
Contact hours are the timetabled hours you spend with academic staff — lectures, seminars, tutorials, labs and supervised practicals. They are typically a minority of the total study time a course
The measured rise in grades is real and well documented. Why it happened is genuinely contested, and the term itself smuggles in an assumption worth examining. What the data shows. Across many
To give admissions tutors evidence of suitability and motivation for the subject that grades alone cannot provide. It is not an autobiography, and the most common failure is treating it as one. What
They are two levels of support for children with special educational needs in England, differing in who decides, what is legally enforceable, and how it is funded. SEN support is the first level,
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty primarily affecting the accuracy and fluency of word reading and spelling. It is neurological in origin, persists across the lifespan, and is unrelated to
Scaffolding is temporary support that enables a learner to do something they could not manage alone, withdrawn progressively as they become able to do it independently. The construction metaphor is
They differ in size, and size determines everything else about how they work and what you should do in them. Lecture. One academic presenting to a large group — dozens to hundreds. The purpose is
Dual coding is combining words and visuals so that information is processed through two channels rather than one. It has reasonable evidence behind it and is frequently confused with the discredited
They are different qualification types in England, differing in how they are assessed and what they prepare you for. GCSEs. Taken at around 16, at the end of compulsory secondary education. Typically
Because it is the clearest case of the world identifying a global environmental problem, agreeing binding action, and measurably fixing it — which makes it the standard reference point in arguments
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a family of thousands of synthetic chemicals defined by carbon-fluorine bonds, among the strongest in organic chemistry. That bond strength is exactly
Light pollution is excessive or misdirected artificial light. It is unusual among environmental problems in being immediately reversible — switching a light off ends it instantly — yet it continues
They are the main pollutants monitored in air quality reporting, and they cause harm through different mechanisms and come from different sources. PM2.5 — fine particulate matter. Particles smaller
A carbon sink is any reservoir absorbing more carbon than it releases. The two dominant natural sinks are the ocean and land vegetation and soils, and together they absorb roughly half of human CO₂
Rewilding is an approach to conservation that aims to restore natural processes and allow ecosystems to organise themselves, rather than managing habitats toward a fixed target state. How it differs
Drought is a temporary meteorological event. Water scarcity is a persistent imbalance between supply and demand. A region can have water scarcity without drought, and drought without scarcity — and
Eutrophication is the over-enrichment of water with nutrients — principally nitrogen and phosphorus — which triggers explosive algal growth and can ultimately strip the water of oxygen. The sequence:
An urban heat island is the measurable tendency for cities to be warmer than surrounding rural areas — commonly several degrees, and occasionally by considerably more at night. What causes it:
Through a difference in how the atmosphere treats incoming sunlight and outgoing heat — and that asymmetry is the entire mechanism. The sequence: Sunlight arrives as mostly visible and near-infrared
A QR code is simply an encoded string — most often a URL — and the risk is that you cannot read it before you act on it. That single property is what makes the format attractive to fraudsters. The
A supply chain attack compromises an organisation indirectly, by attacking something it trusts and installs — a software vendor, a library, an update mechanism or a service provider. Rather than
Potentially everything you do in your browser — which makes extensions one of the most under-appreciated security risks on a personal computer. What a permissive extension can access: The content of
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a challenge designed to be easy for people and difficult for software. Why they are getting harder
For a mixture of genuine functional need, defensive over-requesting, and data collection — and the three are difficult to distinguish from the request alone. Legitimate reasons: The feature requires
They are nested categories, not alternatives — each sits inside the one before. Artificial intelligence is the broadest: any system performing tasks that would normally require human intelligence. It
A large language model (LLM) is a statistical model trained to predict likely continuations of text. A search engine retrieves documents that exist. They answer questions in fundamentally different
Metadata is data about the file rather than its visible content. Almost every file carries some, and it frequently reveals considerably more than people intend to share. Photographs — EXIF data: GPS
A file format is the actual structure of the data inside the file. A file extension is the few characters after the dot in the filename — a label, and nothing more. The crucial point is that the
An operating system sits between your hardware and your applications, managing resources so that programs do not have to know about the specific machine they run on — and so that they cannot
Yes, noticeably — and it is one of the few specification upgrades most people perceive immediately, though it comes with a real cost. What refresh rate is. The number of times per second the display
It depends almost entirely on screen size and viewing distance, and for most living rooms the honest answer for 8K is no. The terms first. 4K in consumer televisions means UHD, 3840 × 2160 — four
A codec determines how audio is compressed for transmission over Bluetooth, and it matters — though less than headphone quality, fit and the source recording. Why compression is necessary. Bluetooth
A NAS (network attached storage) is a small dedicated computer containing one or more drives, connected to your network rather than to a single machine. An external drive connects directly to one
Because the printer and the ink are sold as a linked system, priced so that the consumable carries the profit. The economics are deliberate rather than accidental. The razor-and-blades model. Inkjet
Burn-in is permanent image retention — a faint ghost of static content remaining visible after the content changes. It is caused by uneven ageing of the display's light-emitting elements rather than
Partly. Some of it is documented and deliberate; much of what is attributed to it has duller explanations. Separating them matters because the remedies differ. What is genuinely documented: The
They describe increasing levels of spatial audio capability, and the labels are used loosely enough that a box saying "Atmos" may deliver very little of it. Stereo (2.0) — two channels, left and
For most homes with coverage problems, yes — and the difference is architectural rather than a matter of power. How a range extender works. It receives the router's signal and rebroadcasts it. The
Usually yes after a couple of years, and the reason is that the television and the software inside it have very different useful lifespans. The core problem with built-in platforms. A TV is expected
Because airline pricing is not a single price with variations — it is a system of fare buckets, restrictions and distribution channels designed to charge different passengers different amounts for