Tasks and exercises

1. Answer the following questions:

a) What can you say about ‘ether’?

b) What is the photoelectric effect?

c) What kind of experiment did Hertz perform in 1888?

d) Did Hertz see the practical value of his discovery?

e) What did Marconi achieve shortly after Hertz’s discovery?

2. Find words in the text that have the following meanings:

a) “to need smth, to depend on smth”;

b) “the tools and pieces of equipment that are needed for a particular activity or task”;

c) “a person or thing that does not follow a rule”;

d) “the path of wires and equipment along which an electric current flows”;

e) “to move around a central fixed point”;

f) “the quality of being valuable and useful to people in their lives and work”;

g) “initially”;

h) “a long straight piece of metal/wood/glass”.

3. Study the collocations in which some of the general scientific words from the text are used:

a) signal (n): weak/ strong / high(low)-frequency signal, acoustic/chemical/light/radar signal, to emit/transmit/generate a signal, to detect/receive/respond to a signal, to convert a signal into;

b) to complete: on time/accurately/correctly;

c) apparatus: experimental/laboratory/electrical;

d) distance: to determine/measure, over a distance (of), at a distance (of), within a distance (of);

e) practical: for practical reasons, be/seem/sound practical;

f) component: basic/central/standard/minor component.

4. Fill in the gaps:

The project has now been successfully _____. A light signal can ____ well over 16 km before it halves intensity. This is a very sophisticated piece of laboratory _____. The researchers discovered a common _____ in all three types of the organism. The sound can be heard over a _____ of 5 miles. The nerves carry these ____ to the brain. Team work was a crucial ____ in our success. The town is situated at a ____ of 20 miles from Oxford. A faint signal from the satellite was ____.

5. Make up 10 sentences with collocations from ex.3.

6. Translate into English:

«Герц приспособил индукционную катушку, чтобы генерировать гигантские искры в зазоре между парой небольших сфер на концах металлических стержней. Это была довольно обычная установка для демонстрационных опытов, однако Герц внес в нее кое-какие усовершенствования: стержни были длиннее, а сферы на концах, служившие конденсаторами, где накапливался заряд, больше, чем обычно. Ширину зазора можно было варьировать, а реостат (проводник с переменным сопротивлением) регулировал разность потенциалов в зазоре. Доведя сопротивление реостата до нуля, чтобы вызвать разряд, Герц с удивлением заметил, что слабые искры не прекращают проскакивать. На скамье рядом с прибором лежала еще одна металлическая катушка с парой контактов, куда были насажены сферы, а между ними оставлен зазор для искрового заряда. Во время работы с индукционной катушкой Герц (или, может быть, его жена) заметили не только ослепительную вспышку между сферами того контура, который катушка подпитывала, но и едва различимые искры в катушке поодаль (которая не была никуда подключена). Ученому выпал редчайший шанс. Как впоследствии писал он сам, «невозможно было прийти к этому явлению, основываясь только на теории» (Гратцер У., «Эврики и эйфории», с. 353-354).

7. Revise the collocations with general scientific lexis from the previous texts, and translate the sentences into English:

a) Исследование, по-видимому, показывает, что мои изначальные гипотезы были верны.

b) Ветряные турбины используются для производства электричества.

c) Применение какого из этих методов вероятней всего даст лучшие результаты?

d) Он изучал физику субатомных частиц у профессора Сейджера.

e) Эти соединения крайне нестабильны.

f) Обнаружение частицы, похожей на бозон Хиггса, стало научным событием, которое с наибольшим нетерпением ожидалось научным сообществом летом 2012.

8. Make a written resume of the text (10-15 sentences) and retell the text orally relying on what you have written.

Marie Curie [mə'riː 'kjuərɪ]

At a time when few women had the opportunity to experience the excitement of scientific research, Marie Curie introduced the world to the marvels of radioactivity. Her ground-breaking work sadly led to her death, as she had no way of knowing that radiation emitted from the materials she studied could trigger cancer.

Born: 1867, Warsaw ['wɔːsɔː], Poland ['pəulənd].

Education: the Sorbonne [sɔrbɔn], Paris.

Major achievement: discovered radioactivity.

Died: 1934, France.

Before reading the text, study the words in the right column (practise pronouncing those which are transcribed):

Born Maria Sklodowska, she grew up in Warsaw and moved to Paris, where she registered her name as “Marie” on arrival. Here she excelled in physics and maths and in 1894 was introduced to the Laboratory Chief at the Paris Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, Pierre Curie [pɪ'e(r)], whom she married the following year. Initially Marie researched the magnetic property of steels. Her focus changed in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays and, almost simultaneously, Frenchman Henri Becquerel [ɑː'nrɪ ˌbekə'rel] (1852–1908) found that minerals containing uranium also gave off unknown rays. While many scientists concentrated on Röntgen’s works, Marie studied Becquerel’s uranium rays. Setting up a laboratory in a damp store room in the Paris Municipal School where Pierre was now a professor, she used a highly sensitive instrument that could measure tiny electrical currents that pass through air which had been bombarded with uranium rays. Pierre and his older brother, Jacques [ʒak], had invented the device 15 years earlier. She discovered that the strength of the rays coming from a material depended only on the amount of uranium it contained. In addition, the electrical effects of the uranium rays were unaffected if you pulverised the uranium-containing material, kept it pure, reacted it to form a compound, presented it wet or dry, or exposed it to light or heat. Her conclusion was that the ability to give out rays must be a fundamental feature of uranium’s atomic structure. Curie then discovered that other materials gave off rays, and called the phenomenon radioactivity. When she found that a compound called pitchblende gave off more rays than was predicted from the amount of uranium in it, Pierre joined in her research. Together they discovered two new elements in the pitchblende, naming them polonium and radium. These findings were controversial, but industrial companies started seeing potential in the work. Already they knew that the rays had value in medical imaging, but Marie started to show that they could damage biological tissue, a finding that led to their use in combating cancer. Marie also became aware that radioactive materials were often a source of heat, and started to speculate about the power that was potentially locked up in such substances – energy that other scientists would realise could be released in nuclear power stations and in deadly weapons.

To excel in [ɪk'sel] – отличаться, выделяться в какой-либо деятельности To introduce smb to smb – представить кого-либо кому-либо, познакомить Steel – сталь Simultaneous – [ˌsɪm(ə)l'teɪnɪəs] одновременный, синхронный Uranium [juə'reɪnɪəm] Give off – испускать, излучать To concentrate on smth ['kɔn(t)s(ə)ntreɪt] Store room – кладовая To bombard ['bɔmbɑːd] – облучать частицами, бомбардировать To pulverise ['pʌlv(ə)raɪz] – распылять Compound ['kɔmpaund] – химическое соединение Fundamental [ˌfʌndə'ment(ə)l] Pitchblende ['pɪʧblend] – уранинит, настуран, урановая смолка Polonium [pə'ləunɪəm] Radium ['reɪdɪəm] Controversial – [ˌkɔntrə'vɜːʃ(ə)l] противоречивй, дискуссионный To combat smth ['kɔmbæt] – бороться с Cancer ['kæn(t)sə] – рак Become aware of smth – понять, узнать что-либо To speculate about ['spekjəleɪt] – размышлять, допускать