Revision exercises

6. Translate the sentences, paying special attention to the usage of tenses. Ask questions to the words in bold. Put the infinitives given in brackets into the correct form:

1. 4500 million years ago, the Earth was a ball of molten rock which has slowly cooled. While the Earth was still forming, the atmosphere was mainly hydrogen and helium. These gases had such small molecules that they escaped from the Earth’s gravitational attraction into outer space.

When plants (to appear) on the Earth, 3500 million years ago, they (to form) oxygen from water and carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. During the last century, an increase in the burning of fossil fuels (горючие полезные ископаемые) (to lead) to a small steady increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now scientists (to look) for ways to make factories and cars run cleaner. In the nearest future scientists (to figure) out ways to burn coal bum (низкопробный) more cleanly.

2. The Greek civilization flourished 2 500 years ago on the shores of the Ionian and Aegean Seas (modern Greece and Turkey). Although its population never exceeded two million, ancient Greece made great innovations in philosophy, politics, architecture and arts, and the Greek culture (to form) the basis of western civilization to this day.

7. Read and translate the following passages:

1. We have to realize that our whole history is the history of technology, regardless of the exact form it took. Technology, for instance, will soon make the “intelligent home”. New homes will have a special electronic system which will connect lights, heating, security, and anything else the owner chooses.

2. Charles Babbage (1792-1871) began his lifelong quest to create a mechanical calculating engine in 1821. That night the young Babbage and his friend John Herschel were pouring over manuscripts of some mathematical tables that they were preparing for the Astronomical society, painstakingly checking the tens of thousands of entries one by one. As they did, they came across error after error made by the ‘computer’, the poorly paid human calculators who worked out such figures. Finally Babbage exclaimed, ‘I wish to god these calculations had been executed by steam’.

In spite of the tedious task of computing tables and the high chance of mistakes, at the time such tables were vital in many spheres of life – science, engineering, insurance, banking and more. When a ship set sail, for instance, the navigator’s cabin was lined with volume after volume of tables to help him pinpoint the ship’s position at sea.

3. An American astronomer Edwin Hubble is remembered by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an orbiting observatory that has shown us some most stunning views of the cosmos ever observed. It was launched into space by the space shuttle Discovery on 25 April 1990. Its instruments detect not only visible light, but also ultraviolet and infrared light. Its camera is able to achieve a resolution ten times greater than even the largest Earth-based telescope. As a result, today’s astronomers can observe distant celestial objects with clarity that Hubble and his contemporaries could only have dreamt of.