Vocabulary comprehension and summary writing

1. Answer the following questions to check your understanding of the text.

1. What does the word “photophone” mean?

2. Who was the first to test the photophone?

3. What is the difference between telephone and photophone?

4. Explain why that new invention didn’t prove to be very practical?

5. Many scientists like Bell dreamed of using light to communicate, didn’t they?

6. What made their dream possible?

7. What is a laser?

8. What is an optical fiber?

9. Why do we call optical fibers as lightguides?

10. What technology is called fiber optics?

11. What reasons are glass fibers replacing copper wires for?

12. What is the most important reason for using glass fibers?

13. What is used for two-way communication?

14. Why is the new technology of fiber optics a better and faster way to communicate?

2. Find in the text English equivalents to the following Ukrainian words and word combinations and write them out:

промінь сонячного світла; новий винахід; мрія про застосування світла, як засобу зв’язку; світло провідник; нести інформацію і повідомлення; займати набагато менше місця; перенавантажені телефонні кабелі; електричні генератори; телефонна пробка; підсилювати електричні сигнали.

3. Give definitions of the following words:

telephone, phonophone, laser, optical fibers, lightguides, fiber optics, repeater, electrical generator, motor.

4. Agree or disagree with the statements given below. The following phrases may be helpful:

certainly, of course, sure, it goes without saying, indeed, as far as I know…

1. “Photo” and “phone” come from the Latin words for “light” and “sound”.

2. The photophone used a beam of sunlight traveling through air to carry the human voice from one place to another.

3. Photophone was Bell’s most promising idea.

4. Scientists and Bell didn’t know that light and electricity traveled as vibrations or waves.

5. Optical fiber is a flexible thread of very clear glass.

6. The fibers are very expensive for telephone companies to buy and install.

7. Devices called repeaters are used to weaken the electrical signal about every mile alone each line.

8. The new technology of fiber optics is a better and faster way to communicate.

5. Open the brackets and translate the words into English:

1. Telephone used (імпульси електричного струму) traveling over copper wires to carry sound.

2. (Не дивлячись на ці проблеми) Bell thought the photophone was his most promising idea.

3. Light could (нести більше інформації) than electricity flowing in cooper wires.

4. Lasers are (потужні джерела) of a special kind of light.

5. Optical fibers are less (дорогі), easier (встановлювати), and more (надійні) than copper wires.

6. Match English terms with their definitions and learn them by heart:

Term	Definition
1. Laser	a) is a device for rectifying alternating current
2. Transformer	b) is a device for amplifying signals
3. Amplifier	c) is a machine for making and concentrating light waves into a very intense beam.

7. Complete the following sentences:

1. Bell dreamed of using light to ….

2. Lasers are powerful sources of a special kind of ….

3. Laser light can pass through the length of an optical fiber and still stay ….

4. Pulses of light flash through optical fibers carrying … and … over great distances.

5. Light could carry more information than electricity flowing in … wives.

8. From the following choose the words that are most nearly the same in meaning to the bold ones:

transmit – send, transfer, promote, support

invent – create, devise, develop, find

powerful – great, strong, effective, long

carry – include, more, bring, occupy

prove – show, follow, confirm, make

9. Explain why:

1. Light carry more information than electricity flowing in copper wires.

2. Laser light can pass through the length of optical fiber and still stay bright.

3. Glass fibers are replacing copper wives.

10. Read and translate the text. Divide it into logical parts and give a suitable title for each of them. Make a short written summary.

The movement of data in a computer is almost the converse of the movement of traffic in a city, Downtown, in the congested core of the microprocessor, the bits fly at an extraordinary rate. But further out, on the broad avenues of copper that link one processor to another and one circuit board to the next, things slow down to a comparative crawl. A Pentium 4 introduced this spring operates at 2.4 GHz, but the data travels on a bus operating at only 400 MHz. The speed picks up again, though, out on the highways of the world's optical-fiber telecommunications networks. Obviously, the closer engineers can bring the optical superhighway to the microprocessor, the fewer copper bottlenecks can occur, as if you could pull out of your driveway straight onto the Autobahn.

So some researchers say that, within just a few years, many of the copper connections in computers will yield to high-speed optical interconnects, in which photons, rather than electrons, will pass signals from board to board, or chip to chip, or even from one part of a chip to another. The idea is simple in principle, and parallels telecommunications systems. An electrical signal from the processor would modulate a miniature laser beam, which would shine through the air or a waveguide to a photodetector, which would in turn pass the signal on to the electronics. Though at the moment it is more expensive to communicate with light than with electric current, the day is coming when only optical technologies will be able to keep up with the demands of ever-more-powerful microprocessors, just as they are now the only reasonable way to move the world's Internet traffic across the kilometers.

We're already projecting that for certain system requirements data rates are going to be high enough and the link length long enough that we're going to have to use optics.

In telecommunications, transmission slows as it passes from the all-optical long-haul network to the lower-bandwidth metropolitan-area network, and finally crawls into the home along copper wires. Just as telecom companies want to increase total bandwidth by moving all-optical transmission closer to your house, the designers of optical interconnects want to get as much bandwidth as possible as dose as possible to the microprocessor. Already, optics connect computer systems across distances of less than 300 meters, and backplane setups are in the works that will speed up transport of data from one board to another within a computer. Farther down the road are systems for increasing the bandwidth between two microprocessors, or among stacks of chips for massively parallel computing. All the pieces are in place-cheap lasers, sensitive detectors, and the methods needed to transmit from one to the other. Now it's just a question of when optical interconnects will perform well enough, and their production cost fall low enough, for them to replace copper wires.