Post-Reading Activities

Comprehension check

Task 1

Explain the title of the article

Task 2

Answer the questions:

1. Did the scientists know exactly what would happen when the first bomb exploded?

2. Did they expect it to be bigger or smaller?

3. How did they feel when it went off?

4. How did the eye-witnesses describe it?

5. What are the indications that Los Alamos is no ordinary town?

6. Why isn`t the town on a map before 1942?

7. Why did the scientists want to share their knowledge with the Russians?

8. Why do you think the politicians didn`t agree with them?

9. In what way do Harold Argo and Carson Mark have different opinions?

10. What do you know about the warship Indianapolis?

11. When and where was the first atomic bomb used in warfare?

Task 3

Who are these people? What does the text say about them?

a) the greatest collection of scientific brains	h) the real villain i) the original target
b) none of them	j) all those sceptics
c) its creators	k) God
d) a community	l) VIP
e) travellers	m) Little Boy
f) the technicians	n) Enola Gay
g) its own proteges

Task 4

What do you think?

1. How did the atomic bomb alter the course of history in the twentieth century?

2. Do you agree with the historian Richard Rhodes?

Text 2 What I Live for

Pre-Reading Activities

Think over the questions and express your opinion on them:

1. What are the goals of human existence?

2. What do people live for?

One viewpoint is given below by the British philosopher, mathematician, and writer Bertrand Russel (1872-1970). Besides being well known for his scholarship and prolific writing on many subjects Russel gained a great deal of fame and notoriety during his life for his active campaigning for the causes of pacifism and a halt to nuclear armament. He wrote the following essay in his later year, while looking back on a long and active life.

What I Have Lived for

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it next, because it relieves loneliness s- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world in to the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what –at least- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to withstand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway over the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people, a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but can not, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.