Tasks and exercises

1. Answer the questions:

a) How socially active was Joseph Priestley?

b) In what circumstances did Priestley get acquainted with Benjamin Franklin?

c) What do you know about Benjamin Franklin?

d) What did Priestley discover about the properties of graphite?

e) What gas did Priestley experiment with after moving to a brewery?

f) What experiments with oxygen did Priestley carry out?

g) What is phlogiston?

h) What happened after Priestley discussed his work with Antoine Lavoisier?

2. In the text find words that have the following meanings:

a) “to produce or create smth”;

b) “heavy in relation to its size”;

c) “the process of communicating with smb”;

d) “to mix with a liquid and become part of it”;

e) “the way smth develops”;

f) “to make a fire stop burning or a light stop shining”;

g) “a round piece of glass with a handle”;

h) “turned upside down”;

i) “based on ideas which are possible rather than real”.

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

a) to deduce: to deduce easily/logically, to deduce smth from, to be able to deduce, to be possible to deduce;

b) interaction: complex interaction, interaction processes, patterns of interaction, interaction among/between/with smth(smb);

c) material (n): toxic/flammable['flæməbl]/inflammable /radioactive/fissionable materials;

d) to study: to study carefully/closely/in depth/in detail/intensively/extensively/widely/fully/thoroughly/systematically, to be well studied, to study under/with smb;

e) to produce: to able/unable to produce, to be expected to/be likely to produce smth, to be designed to produce smth, to combine to produce smth;

f) invention: latest/new/modern/brilliant/ingenious/wonderful successful invention, to come up with/design an invention, to register/patent an invention.

4. Fill in the gaps using the words from ex.3:

All of these processes combine to _____ a particular form of radiation. He failed to ____ his invention and never made a dollar from it. In the third year at the physics faculty a number of areas are _____ in detail. This technology was designed to ____ interactive educational programmes. Higher radioactive ____ costs have pushed up the price for many scientific experiments. Which method is likely to ____ the best results? He ____ the physics of subatomic particles under Professor Sager. The total amount can be _____ logically from the figures available. The influence of heredity is best _____ in genetically identical twins. The study focuses on studying the complex ______ between living organisms and their environment. We ____ from the behaviour of the particles that they are charged. The group has observed some specific patterns of _____ in this group of particles.

5. Make up your own sentences in English with the collocations from ex.3. Translate them into Russian, and ask your groupmates to translate them back into English.

6. Translate into English:

a) Пристли нравилось общаться с великими мыслителями своего времени.

b) Незадолго до этого Франклин разработал эксперимент, в котором во время грозы был запущен воздушный змей, и в результате он сделал вывод, что молния состоит из электричества.

c) Открытие Пристли того, что электричество проходит через графит, легло в основу электроники и привело к созданию резистора задолго до изобретения кремниевого чипа.

d) Из-за того, что ртуть обладает большой плотностью, другие вещества поднимались к поверхности.

e) Многие вещества производили газ, который собирался на поверхности ртути, и Пристли изучал этот газ.

7. The following contexts are about chemical elements (titanium, arsenic, magnesium, antimony, fluorine, manganese, silicon, helium, ferrum, mercury, sulphur, fluorine, nickel, caesium, iodine and argentum). Fill in the gaps:

a) ___ is a grey-white metal that breaks easily; it is found as a free element in nature (often in combination with iron), and in many minerals. It is a metal with important industrial metal alloy ['ælɔɪ] uses, particularly in stainless steels. Historically, ___ is named for various black minerals from the same region of Magnesia in Greece which gave names to similar-sounding magnesium, Mg, and magnetite¹, an ore of the element iron, Fe;

b) the main use of metallic ___ is for strengthening alloys of copper and especially lead (for example, in car batteries). ___ is a common n-type dopant (диффузант)² in semiconductor electronic devices, and the optoelectronic compound gallium arsenide is the most common semiconductor in use after doped silicon;

c) ___ is a silver-white metal used in making various strong light materials; ___ was discovered in Cornwall, Great Britain, by William Gregor in 1791 and named for the Titans of Greek mythology;

d) liquids containing ___ are sometimes used as antiseptics;

e) ___ is a greyish-white precious metal used for making coins, decorative objects, etc.;

f) ___ is a pale yellow substance that produces a strong and unpleasant smell when it burns, and is used in medicine, industry, etc.;

g) ___ is a poisonous silver liquid used for making thermometers;

h) ___ is a poisonous greenish gas with a strong smell, often used in swimming pools to keep the water clean;

i) ___ is a light, silver-white metal, it burns with a bright white flame. Its common oxidation number is +2. It is an alkaline earth metal and the eighth most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and ninth in the known universe as a whole;

j) ___ exists as a grey solid or as a brown powder, found in rocks and sand, used in making glass, transistors, etc. It is less reactive than its chemical analogue carbon, the nonmetal directly above it in the periodic table, but more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table.;

k) ___ is a soft silver-white metal that reacts strongly in water, it is used in photoelectric cells;

l) ___ is a poisonous pale yellow gas, very reactive;

m) ___ is a silver-white metal which breaks easily, especially in making alloys. ____ compounds have been known since ancient times and were used for cosmetics;

n) ___ is a very light gas that is often used to fill balloons, to freeze food, etc.;

o) ___ is a hard silver-white metal, used in making steel and other types of alloys; on Earth, native ___ is always found in combination with iron, a reflection of major end products of supernova nucleosynthesis; an iron–___ mixture is thought to compose Earth's inner core;

p)___ is a hard strong metal used in making steel, found in small quantities in blood, food, etc.

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

Alessandro Volta [ˌælɪ'sæːndrəu 'vɔːltə]

A world without batteries is almost impossible to imagine, but when Allesandro Volta was born in Italy, no such thing existed. Although Volta didn’t speak for the first four years of his life and his family became convinced that he had a mental disability, at the age of twenty-nine he started teaching physics at the local high school, and within months of arriving at the school he had built his first invention.

Born: 1754, Como, Italy.

Education: no university education.

Major achievement: created the first electrical battery.

Died: 1827, Como, Italy.

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

Named an eletrophorus, this device produced an electric charge from friction in a manner similar to the action of rubbing a party balloon on a sweater. Soon Volta was promoted to Professor of Physics and three years later moved to the same position at Pavia University. Here he came into contact with Luigi Galvani [lu'ɪʤɪ gæl'vɑːni] (1737–1798), a fellow researcher who had stimulated muscles in the limbs of recently dead animals using electricity. One day, while cutting a frog’s leg, Galvani’s steel scalpel had touched a brass hook that was holding the leg in place. The leg twitched. Galvani was convinced that this twitch had revealed the effects of what he called ‘animal electricity’– the life force within the muscles of the frog. Volta was sceptical and studied whether the electric current could have come from outside the animal. He discovered that bringing two different metals together sometimes caused a small electric current to run, and he correctly guessed that this had occurred when Galvani’s scalpel touched the hook. The fact that you could produce electricity without the presence of animal tissue proved that Galvani’s idea of animal electricity was wrong, but equally showed that muscles could respond to external stimuli. Taking the idea further, Volta created a column of alternating silver and zinc discs. He separated the discs with sheets of cardboard soaked in salty water. This stack produced a constantly flowing electric current, and building stacks of varying numbers of elements produced more or less powerful currents. His largest column consisted of 60 layers, but he soon found that having more than 20 elements in the stack produced a current that was painful if you held on to the wires attached to either end. What Volta didn’t know was that all metals hold on to their electrons with different degrees of tenacity. If you place two different metals next to each other, electrons will flow from the one that is relatively more keen to give them up – this is the start of an electrical current. When Volta demonstrated his stack to the French Academy of Science, the onlookers were so impressed that Napoleon [nə'pəulɪən] made him the Count of Lombardy. His contribution to the understanding of electricity was so significant that a key measurement unit of electricity, the volt, was named after him.

Electrophorus – электрофор (прибор для получения электричества, основанный на возбуждении электрического состо-яния через индукцию) Party balloon – воздушный шарик Sweater ['swetə] To promote – (зд.) повышать Fellow – принадлежащий к той же группе, имеющий нечто общее (fellow student, fellow citizen) Muscle ['mʌsl] –мышца Steel – сталь Scalpel ['skælp(ə)l] Brass [brɑːs] –латунь Hook – крюк To twitch – дергаться Sceptical ['skeptɪk(ə)l] Occur [ə'kɜː] – случаться, происходить Tissue ['tɪʃuː] – ткань (биол.) External – внешний (антоним – internal) Stimuli ['stɪmjəlai] (sg. stimulus ['stɪmjələs]) Column ['kɔləm] To alternate ['ɔːltəneɪt] –чередоваться Zinc [zɪŋk] Cardboard – картон To soak – вымачивать Stack – (зд.) столб Tenacity [tɪ'næsətɪ] – упорство, стойкость Keen – (зд.) готовый, склонный Onlooker ['ɔnˌlukə] – зритель, наблюдатель, зевака Count of Lombardy ['lɔmbədɪ] – граф Ломбардский (область в Сев. Италии) Contribution [ˌkɔntrɪ'bjuːʃ(ə)n] – вклад Volt [vɔlt]