1. Subterranean — подземный (от лат. Terra — земли)

2. Blocks of flats — многоквартирные дома

THE REFRIGERATING SUN

' A look at a map of Turkmenia will show you that its northern-most points ¹ lie south of Yalta and Vladivos­tok, whereas the southern-most points are on the same latitude as Algiers and Teheran. In its number of clear sunny days (more than 250 in a year) Turkmenia can be compared to Arabia, the Sahara, Egypt and the Sudan. About 80 per cent of the republic's territory is occupied by the Kara I\um. Each square metre of this desert gets a dose of sun rays amounting to more than two million great calories a year.

The use of solar energy for the needs of the economy and the population is of great importance.

The Physico-Technical Institute of the Turkmen Acad­emy of Sciences is a centre working to place solar energy at the service of man.

At the Institute's experimental station located near Ashkhabad there is an original structure with a huge concave mirror 1259 metres in area. It is installed on a lattice-like metal support² at an angle of 40° and faces the sun.

The principle of the solar installation is both simple and original. The rays concentrated in and reflected by the mirror fall on to a cylindrical boiler filled with a liquid known as phreon which evaporates at a tempera­ture of 15-18°C. In summer, solar energy sets the refrig­eration plant in motion and the vapours of phreon, entering the refrigerator installation through pipes, create an in­side temperature 10-15° below than outside. The more intense the radiation, the faster the temperature falls. The installation operates non-stop with the help of a "time relay" which keeps the mirror always turned towards the sun.

Turkmen solar energy specialists are now working to reduce the size of solar installations and make them more economical, compact and easier to transport to the (re­mote) desert regions of Turkmenia that lack power sources.

Notes

1, Northern-most points — самые северные точки

2. On a lattice-like metal support — на металлической подставке в виде решетки

TSIOLKOVSKY'S DREAM NEARS REALIZATION (to be read after Lesson 1.2)

The young man spent hours over ideas he had put down in a schoolboy's note-book. In a home-made machine he made lots of experiments to see how living things withstood the effects of gravity and acceleration. The date was 1879, in the small Russian village near Ryazan. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was 22, waiting for a post of a schoolmaster.

The problem at which he worked was interplanetary travel. Though Tsiolkovsky soon began a long career as a teacher of mathematics, man's penetration into space remained his life-long study.

In 1883 he noted that the rocket would be the only man-made instrument able to reach space. The prediction was published only in 1954, when his collected works were printed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The mathematical terms ¹ of space travel were worked out by Tsiolkovsky as early as 1895 in a manuscript "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Reaction-Propelled Appa­ratus". When it was published in 1903, Tsiolkovsky won immediate international recognition, especially among the pioneers of aviation science.

Tsarist Russia had no research money for the modest school-teacher of Kaluga, and to get money for his re­searches Tsiolkovsky tried to publish his book "Outside the Earth" in 1916, in which he described the imaginary flight of a manned rocket ship in orbit about the earth.

It v/as only in 1920 that the book was published and it fired the imagination of other scientists in our country as well as abroad. In 1929 when Tsiolkovsky was 72, Pro­fessor Herman Obert, a German scientist, wrote to him: "You kindled this fire. We shall not let it die. It is nec­essary that man's greatest dream should be realized." *

In the book "Outside the Earth" Tsiolkovsky assem­bled a group of famous scientists in an imaginary moun­tain laboratory: Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Helmholz, Franklin and a modest Russian named Ivanov. At their disposal is an army of the world's best engineers and technicians. The year Is 2017.

Together the scientists work out the theories of cosmic flight. They test rockets and fuels, discuss ways of living aboard a rocket, and design a 300-ton spaceship. The voy­age that follows is described very vividly. Some of the details of this imaginary flight you have seen in reality on your own TV screen—weightless objects floating around a cosmonaut, the black sky of space, the blast-off of a man-carrying rocket. ³

In 1935 Tsiolkovsky wrote to Soviet youth: "All who are occupied with writing science fiction are doing good work; they excite interest, promote the working of the brain and bring into being people ⁴ who will work on grand projects in the future."

This was the last year of his life. A few days before he died, Tsiolkovsky's letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU appeared in Pravda. He wrote that all his life he had been fighting to help mankind and he was leav­ing his works to the Soviet Government and the Commu­nist Party and he was sure they would successfully com­plete this work.

Notes

1. mathematical terms — математические расчеты

2. that man's greatest dream should be realized — чтобы осущест­вилась величайшая мечта человека

3. the blast-oft of a man-carrying rocket — запуск ракеты с чело­веком иа борту

4. to promote the working of the brain and bring into being people —

способствовать работе ума и появлению людей

URBAN PROBLEMS

(to be read after Lesson 18)

The urban problem is one of the most complex in to­day's world. One out of every six people lives in a city with a population of more than one million. There is a tendency towards rise in the population of cities. Today there are a lot of big cities in the world with a popula­tion ranging from 5 to 10 million and above. By the year 2000 demographers expect that Mexico will have a popu­lation of 30 million, Calcutta, some 20 million, and Bom­bay and Jacarta, from 15 to 20 million. The problems aris-"ing as a result of this are water supply, public transport, employment, food, housing construction, etc.

There are more than 20 cities in the USSR with the population of over one million. Large cities are not con­centrated, but are situated across the entire territory of the country. Over 1,200 new cities have been founded during the Soviet years.

How do new cities appear? The principal factor here is the construction of plants and other enterprises and of large industrial complexes. Togliatti is a classical exam­ple. It developed following the construction of a big car plant. Cities are created in step with ¹ the discoveries of oil and natural gas resources, the construction of the Bai­kal-Amur Railway. Some cities appear as scientific cen­tres and resorts.

The Soviet Union has great experience in building new cities. They are going up in the hot deserts of Central Asia, in the Siberian taiga, practically everywhere in the country where industrial and cultural development is In progress.⁸

Notes