X. Answer the fact-finding questions trying not to give a one-word answer:

1. What is futurology? Does it seek to understand past and present or only future?

2. What does the term mean? When did future studies emerge?

3. How does futurology distinguish from other disciplines?

4. Why does it use models and methods from other academic disciplines?

5. What subjects and methods does futures studies exclude?

6. What subjects and methods does it include?

7. What is the future portion of? What is it opposed to?

8. Who are futurists?

9. Futurologists attempt to apply methodologies, don’t they?

10. What can futures education encourage?

XI. Scan the gapped statements think about missing information:

• Futurology often ______ not only possible but also ______, ______, and ______ futures.

• Futurology is the detailed _______ and _______ of the _____ in which things will _____ in the future on the basis of ________ in history.

• Futurology typically attempts to ______ or ______ view based on ______ from a _____ of different disciplines.

• Futurologists attempt to _____ Strategic ______ for ______ alternative futures.

• The ______ and ______ of futures studies include______, ______, and ______ variations or _______ transformations of the______, both social and "natural".

XII. Present the main idea of the text.

XIII. Render the text close to its original variant.

XIV. Make a written translation of the text. Put all types of questions covering the plot of the text. Retell it.

Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a recent form of history which attempts to answer "what if" questions known as counterfactuals. It seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen nor had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur.

The purpose of this exercise is to ascertain the relative importance of the event, incident or person the counterfactual hypothesis is negating. For instance, to the counterfactual claim "What would have happened had Hitler died in the July, 1944, assassination attempt?", all sorts of possibilities become readily apparent, starting with the reasonable assumption that the Nazi generals would have in all likelihood sued for peace, bringing an early end to World War II. Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the importance of Hitler as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the course of the War and, ultimately, of world history.

Counterfactual history is in many ways a reaction to the extreme de-personalization and determinism of much of current historical studies, with their emphasis on social history as opposed to event- and personality-driven history.

Few attempts to bring counterfactual history into the world of academia were made until the 1996 publication of Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, a collection of essays exploring different scenarios by a number of historians, edited by the historian N.Ferguson. Ferguson has become a significant advocate of counterfactual history, using counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to deterministic theories of history such as Marxism, and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly different modern world.

It should be noted that counterfactual history is most emphatically not historical revisionism (negationism). Nor should it be confused with the genre of alternate history fiction. In general, the main distinguishing feature of counterfactual history is that it is interested precisely in the incident or event that is being negated by the counterfactual, and is seeking to evaluate its relative historical importance by means of the counterfactual. Thus, the counterfactual historian attempts to provide reasoned arguments for each change, and the changes are usually outlined only in broad terms, since the results of the counterfactual are not the point of the exercise but merely the byproduct. An alternative history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event.