Tasks and exercises

1. Answer the following questions:

a) When did Joule produce his first major scientific results?

b) What did Joule’s experiment with the paddle consist in and what did it lead to?

c) How did Joule overturn the caloric theory?

d) What is the Joule-Kelvin effect?

e) How can you evaluate Joule’s contribution to science?

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

a) “the same in all parts and at all times”;

b) “to start to go faster”;

c) “a situation in which two or more objects crash into each other”;

d) “the opposite of ‘to contract’ ”;

e) “to a fairly large degree, especially when compared to smth else”;

f) “(of statements or pieces of evidence) to be so different from each other that one of them must be wrong”;

g)“typical or normal”;

h) “to operate smth”;

i) “to change smth”;

j) “a judgement or opinion about the quality or value of smth”;

k) “not intended to be moved”;

l) “to make smth happen”;

m) “immediately”;

n) “preceding” [prɪ'siːd ɪŋ].

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

a) proportion (n): correct/direct/inverse proportion, keep smth in proportion, proportion of smth to smth, out of proportion;

b) to refer: be used to refer to smth, to refer briefly to smth, frequently/often/commonly referred to;

c) rate (n): at a constant/expected/regular rate, fast/slow rate, improve/increase/slow down rate;

d) to transform: considerably/profoundly/entirely/totally, to manage to transform smth, to transform from into;

e) to transfer: carefully/directly/easily/immediately/gradually /eventually;

f) mechanism: effective/precise, to work/operate;

g) estimate: approximate/conservative, official/current, to be based on, to vary;

h) term: to denote smth, to coin a term, to apply a term, a specific/broad/precise term;

i) unit: a unit of smth, a basic/standard unit.

4. Fill in the gaps:

Data are easily ____ electronically. Marie Curie ____ a damp storeroom in the Paris Municipal School into a laboratory. They created an effective ­_____ for lifting weights. The ___ ‘acid rain’ was ____ in the 19th century. As you grow older your metabolic ___ slows down. The human population in this region is expanding in inverse _____ to the wildlife. Skills cannot be _____ directly from the teacher to the student. The ____ of oxygen to nitrogen was three to one. The ___ ‘renewable energy’ is ____, for example, to energy deriving from solar radiation. The term ‘M-theory’ is used to ____ to a ‘grand unifying theory’ that would integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics. The costs of this project are out of ____ to the budget. He briefly ____ to the report. The costs of this project are increasing at a constant ___.

5. Make up 10 sentences in English with the collocations from ex.3.

6. Translate into English:

a) Он обнаружил, что количество энергии, на которое провод нагревался, было пропорционально квадрату величины электрического тока.

b) Он сформулировал это в уравнении, которое сейчас обозначают как закон Джоуля.

c) Нагревание происходит быстрее по мере усиления электрического тока, так как более быстрый поток создает намного больше столкновений.

d) Эта энергия превращалась в тепло в результате ударов весла о поверхность воды.

e) Теплота (caloric) считалась жидкостью, которая могла передаваться от одного тела к другому, но не могла быть создана или уничтожена.

f) Это открытие, известное как эффект Джоуля-Томсона, лежит в основе механизма, который управляет системами охлаждения.

g) Джоуль и Томсон также написали статью, в которой впервые приблизительно посчитали скорость движения молекул газа.

h) Имя Джоуля увековечено в термине «Джоуль», используемом как единица измерения энергии.

7. A number of English nouns (usually with Greek and Latin cores) have special plurals: datum, stimulus, phenomenon, matrix, thesis, etc. Open the brackets putting the nouns in the plural:

a) These (datum) show that the experiment was successful.

b) The latest findings reflected in these (thesis) are of special interest to us.

c) Physics studies natural (phenomenon).

d) The animals were conditioned to respond to auditory (stimulus).

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

Ernest Rutherford ['ɜːnist 'rʌðəfəd]

When he died suddenly in 1937, the New York Times wrote that in a generation that saw one of the greatest revolutions in the entire history of science Rutherford was known as the leading explorer of the infinitely complex universe within the atom, a universe that he was first to penetrate.

Born: 1871, Spring Grove, New Zealand.

Education: Canterbury College, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Major achievement: “father of nuclear physics” (concept of radioactive half-life, alpha and beta radiation, Rutherford model of the atom, discovery of the proton, etc.).

Died: 1937, Cambridge, England.

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

Ernest Rutherford was brought up in New Zealand, and went to study and do research in several key universities around the world. But it was in his native country that he developed simple but effective mechanisms and monitoring equipment to determine whether iron was magnetic at very high frequencies of magnetising current. After three failed attempts at getting into medicine, Rutherford succeeded in getting a grant to study science and found himself working with Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) ['tɔmsən] in Cambridge University’s Cavendish laboratory ['kæv(ə)ndɪʃ lə'bɔrət(ə)rɪ]. Here Rutherford adapted his detector of “fast transient circuits” and used it to investigate some of the properties of insulating materials. Impressed with his ability, Thomson invited him to join a special team studying the electrical conduction of gases. During this work, Rutherford discovered that there were two different forms of rays coming from radioactive elements. Passing a beam of such rays through a magnetic field, he quickly saw that some were bent, while others travelled straight on. The ones that were straight on he called alpha particles – which are in fact helium atoms with their electrons stripped off – while those bent by the magnetic field he called beta particles, which turned out to be electrons. Moving to McGill University in Montreal [ˌmɔntrɪ'ɔːl], Canada, Rutherford discovered radon, a chemically unreactive but radioactive gas, and published his first book on radioactivity. His work in McGill University was the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908. It was when he returned to England, this time moving to the University of Manchester ['mænʧɪstə], that he had an insight that would change our appreciation of the world. He had given a student a laboratory practical to run, in which they fired alpha particles at thin films of gold. Most of the particles shot through the gold leaf, but a few were deflected, while one or two bounced straight back. Rutherford said that this was as if a large naval artillery round had been deflected by a piece of tissue paper. It was not until 1911 that he deduced this could only have occurred if the mass of gold atoms was contained in an incredibly tiny nucleus. He left it for a young Danish ['deɪnɪʃ] scientist, Niels Bohr [ˈniːls ˈbɔː(r)] (1885–1962) to add that the rest of the atom would consist of a halo of electrons flying around the nucleus, much in the way that planets orbit around a star.

Mechanism ['mekənɪz(ə)m] To determine [dɪ'tɜːmɪn] –определить Iron ['aɪən ] Magnetising current ['mægnətaɪzɪŋ 'kʌr(ə)nt] – ток намагничивания Fast transient circuit [fɑːst 'trænzɪənt 'sɜːkɪt] – быстрая переходная схема Insulating ['ɪnsjəleɪtɪŋ] – изоляционный, непроводящий Insulating material – диэлектрик Conduction – проводимость Beam [biːm] – пучок, луч Alpha ['ælfə] Helium ['hiːlɪəm] To strip off– снимать Beta ['beitə] Radon ['reɪdɔn] Insight ['ɪnˌsaɪt] –понимание, догадка Appreciation [əˌpriːʃɪ'eɪʃ(ə)n] – понимание, оценка Film – пленка, тонкий лист To deflect – заставить изменить направление, отклонить To bounce – прыгать, отскакивать Naval artillery round – военно-морской артиллерийский снаряд Tissue paper – тонкая оберточная бумага Incredibly – невероятно Halo ['heɪləu] – ореол