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1. The town we live in

1. My native town is Angarsk. Angarsk is a young town. The town is situated on the banks of two rivers the Angara and the Kitoy. Angarsk is a fast-growing town. It’s an industrial town with the population of over 280,000 people. There is a big plant and some smaller factories here. There are no industrial enterprises in the town. They are in the suburbs. The Angarsk Chemical works is one of the largest enterprises in our country. Chemical works is a complex of factories for petroleum refining, petrochemical synthesis and for a wide range of consumer goods production.

2. Angarsk is well planned. Its streets are wide and straight. The longest street in the town is Leningrad Avenue. The main street of our town is Karl Marx Street. The centre of the town is Lenin Square.

3. There are many places of interest in Angarsk. Among them are Palaces of Culture. The newest and the biggest one is the Palace “Sovremenik” which is situated on Engels Street. In this Palace there is a branch of Irkutsk Drama theatre. There are some museums in our town: Museum of Minerals, Museum of Victory. The most interesting and well-known establishment of the kind in Russia is Clocks and Watches Museum. It was founded by famous collector Kurdjukov. It is only one museum in our country. Many guests from our town as well as fro other towns come to see this wonderful exhibition.

4. There are many higher schools, colleges, technical schools, vocational schools and a lot of secondary schools, two of which are boarding schools.

5. Our people have places where they can stay and have a rest after work. There they can also get medical treatment. These are the so-called health-houses inside the town. We have also some tourist rest-houses outside the town. People with their families can go there for the week-end and have a rest on the majestic outskirts in the forest.

2. Angarsk State Technical Academy

1. The history of the Angarsk State Technical Academy goes back to 1960 when a branch of Irkutsk Polytechnic Institute was established in Angarsk.

2. Nowadays the Academy has three modern buildings with well-equipped labs and studies, a big library and a reading hall. It is provided with a gym complex including swimming pool and various sports facilities. There are also video-classes and computer studies. More than three thousand students study at the Academy and their number is constantly increasing.

3. The Academy has three forms of tuition: full-time, part-time and extra-mural. There are three departments: department of technology, cybernetics and department of business and management. Most of the students have to pay for the training course. However, some students are able to get education free of charge.

4. The students study mathematics, physics, chemistry, theoretical mechanics, strength of materials, foreign language, history and many special subjects. Teaching staff consists of 200 doctors, candidates and specialists. The training course lasts 5 years. The academic year is divided into two terms. At the end of each term, the students have to take credit tests and exams.

5. The students of our Academy get following specialities: economist, electronics engineer, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and others. The students begin to study special subjects at the third course. They have practice at plants and construction sites of our town.

6. The undergraduates do their final thesis and after proving it, they get a diploma. Graduates of the Academy now occupy key posts in industry, commerce and public services around the country.

3. Science and technological progress

1. It is not much of exaggeration to say that we live in a world that materially and intellectually has been created by science.

2. The means of communication that bind the continents into a single community depend on scientific know-how, without modern sanitation it would be impossible to have large centres of population; without modern industry and agriculture, it would be impossible to feed, to clothe and to provide the abundant life to this large population.

3. Over the past 150 years the range of human knowledge has been doubled every 12 or 15 years. In 1930 man knew 4 times as much as he did in 1900; by 1960 his knowledge had grown sixteen-fold, and by the year 2000 it can be expected to be a hundred times what it had been a century previously.

4. The second part of the twentieth century has brought a number of technical innovations which are still very young but which are taken so much for granted that it is as if they have always existed.

5. The transistor was not invented until 1948. The invention of ICs (integrated circuits) in 1958 brought in a new era of change in the field so fundamental that it already has the characteristics of a second industrial revolution.

6. A mere 12 years separated the launching of the satellite Sputnik I in 1957 and man's first landing on the Moon in 1969. The first long-term orbital station Salyut launched in 1971 opened a new era in space research, providing the possibility of conducting investigations in the field of astrophysics, space technology, medicine, biology, etc. under conditions inconceivable on the earth. Another period of 10 years and in 1981 we could witness the launching of a typically new cosmic vehicle - the Shuttle.

7. Events such as these are characteristic of the rate of technological development in the second half of the 20^th century. Science occupies a central position in modern society. It dominates man's whole existence. Research and innovations in technology should improve society's living and working conditions and remedy the negative effects of technical and social changes.

4. Albert Einstein

1. Albert Einstein is known all over the world as a brilliant theoretical physicist and the founder of the theory of relativity. He is perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Some of his ideas made possible the atomic bomb as well as television and other inventions.

2. He was born in 1879 in a small German town. The Einstein family soon moved to Munich where Albert went to school. Neither his parents nor his school teachers thought much of his mental abilities. His uncle often joked: "Not everybody is born to become a professor."

3. In 1895 Albert failed the entrance examination to a technical college in Zurich. A year later, however, he managed to pass the exam and entered the college. After graduating from the college, Einstein started to work at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905 he wrote a short article in a science magazine. This was his “Special Theory of Relativity” which gave the world the most famous equation relating mass and energy (E = mc2), the basis of atomic energy.

4. Later he became a professor in several European universities and in 1914 moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. After ten years of hard work he created his “General Theory of Relativity”. In 1921 Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

5. A Jew and a pacifist he was attacked by the Nazis, and when Hitler came to power in 1933 he decided to settle in the United States.

6. In 1939 Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt at the request of several prominent physicists, outlining the military potential of nuclear energy and the dangers of a Nazi lead in this field. His letter greatly influenced the decision to build an atomic bomb though he took no part in the Manhattan Project. After the war he spoke out passionately against nuclear weapon and repression.

7. Einstein died in 1955. The artificial element einsteinium has been named in his