Tasks and exercises

1. Answer the questions:

a) Why is Ernest Rutherford considered the father of nuclear physics?

b) What scientific achievements did he make in New Zealand?

c) In what field did he want to work before going to the Cavendish laboratory?

d) What famous physicist did he work with there?

e) What is the difference between alpha and beta radiation?

f) What did Rutherford discover in his “gold foil experiment”?

g) How did Niels Bohr continue Rutherford’s research?

2. Find additional information about Ernest Rutherford and answer the questions:

a) What kind of family was he born into?

b) Was he a good teacher?

c) Who are John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton?

d) What chemical element was named after Rutherford and when?

3. Find words in the text that have the following meanings and make sentences of your own using these words:

a) “most important, essential, critical, vital”;

b) “to discover the facts about smth, to establish”;

c) “to modify”;

d) “understanding”;

e) “to form an opinion about smth based on the information or evidence that is available”.

4. Study the collocations in which the following words occur:

a) to acknowledge: be generally/widely acknowledged, to refuse to acknowledge smth, openly/fully/publicly acknowledge smth;

b) university: attend/go to/study at/apply for/enter/graduate from university;

c) to monitor: to monitor the situation, monitor smth carefully/closely/constantly;

d) distinct: distinct from, clearly/ fundamentally/ formally/ qualitatively distinct.

5. Fill in the gaps:

The workers are constantly _____ for exposure to radiation. He publicly _____ that he might have made a mistake. She’s at _____, studying engineering. It is necessary to keep these two issues ____. This is a universally _____ truth. There is stiff competition for _____ places. These organisms are quite ____ from one another.

6. Translate the following sentences:

a) Эрнест Резерфорд учился и вел научную работу в нескольких важнейших университетах мира.

b) Резерфорд получил грант на обучение и работу в лаборатории Кэвендиш под руководством Дж. Дж. Томсона.

c) Впечатленный его талантом, Томсон пригласил Резерфорда присоединиться к команде ученых, исследовавших электропроводность газов.

d) В ходе этой работы Резерфорд открыл и дал имя альфа и бета излучению.

e) Во время своего пребывания в университете Макгилла в Монреале, Резерфорд открыл радиоактивный газ радон и опубликовал свою первую книгу о радиоактивности.

f) Резерфорд поставил опыт по рассеянию (scattering) альфа-частиц на металлической фольге (foil), сделав вывод о существовании в атоме массивного ядра.

g) Исследования Резерфорда продолжил Нильс Бор, внеся значительный вклад в теорию атомного ядра.

7. Quite a few sentences in the text contain emphatic constructions. For example, “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”. Stylistic inversion can be formed with the help of the introductory “it” (as in the previous example), the words “only”, “not only … but (also)”, “never”, “hardly/scarcely…when”, “no sooner… than”, “do + affirmative infinitive”, etc.

Consider the following examples:

Only in the University of Munich can you find equipment like this.

Not only did he read the book, but he understood it very well.

Never have I seen such a thing.

Hardly/scarcely had we sat down when the lecturer came in.

No sooner had we sat down than the lecturer came in.

“[…] though we don’t yet have a complete quantum theory of gravity we do know that the origin of the universe was a quantum event” (Stephen Hawking).

8. Find sentences containing emphatic constructions in the text and translate them.

9. Paraphrase the following sentences adding emphasis:

a) In his early work Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life.

b) The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after Rutherford in 1997.

c) He pioneered the “Rutherford model of the atom”, through his discovery and interpretation of “Rutherford scattering” in his gold foil experiment.

d) In 1932 John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton conducted the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner.

e) Rutherford’s work in McGill University was the basis for the Nobel Chemistry Prize that he was awarded in 1908.

10. Write a resume of the text in 10-15 sentences.

11. Retell the text orally.

Edwin Hubble ['edwɪn 'hʌbl]

In the 1920s most of Edwin Hubble’s colleagues ['kɔliːgz] believed the Milky Way galaxy made up the entire cosmos ['kɔzmɔs]. But peering¹ deep into space, Hubble realised that the Milky Way is just one of millions of galaxies, and that these galaxies are all rushing away from each other.

Born: 1889, Marshfield, USA.

Education: University of Chicago [ʃɪ'kɑːgəu] and University of Oxford.

Major achievement: showed that the universe is huge and expanding.

Died: 1953, San Marino USA.

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

Having studied science in Chicago and Oxford, Edwin Hubble started to examine the stars at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin [wɪs'kɔn(t)sɪn] before moving on to the prestigious Mount Wilson Observatory in California, which housed the world’s most powerful telescope. The main focus of his attention was on strange, fussy clouds of light called ‘nebulae’. At Mount Wilson, Hubble found himself working alongside Harlow Shapley (1885-1972), an astronomer who had recently measured the size of the Milky Way. Using bright stars called Cepheid variables as standardised light sources, he had calculated that the galaxy was 300,000 light-years across – ten times bigger than anyone had thought. Shapley was convinced that the Milky Way contained all the stars and matter in the universe – that there was nothing beyond it. Shapley believed that the luminous nebulae that interested Hubble were just clouds of glowing gas, and they were relatively nearby. In 1924 however, Hubble spotted a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda [ən'drɔmɪdə] nebula, and using Shapley’s technique showed that the nebula was nearly a million light-years away – a fact that placed it way outside the Milky Way. We now know that this is the nearest of tens of billions of galaxies. This alone didn’t satisfy Hubble’s curiosity. As he studied Andromeda, he realised that the light coming from it was slightly redder than he would have anticipated. The effect is similar to listening to the siren of a moving police car. As it approaches, the tone goes higher, and as it passes the tone drops. A shift towards red is equivalent to a drop in tone. The most likely cause of this so-called red shifting was that the galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way – from our own galaxy. By measuring the shift in all the nebulae he could find, Hubble came to realise that the farther away a galaxy is from Earth, the greater the red shift – in other words, the faster it is moving away from us. The explanation was extraordinary: the entire universe is expanding. When Einstein heard of Hubble’s discovery, he was thrilled. A decade earlier Einstein’s new general theory of relativity had predicted that the universe must either be expanding or contracting. Astronomers had told him it was static, so he added an extra ‘cosmological term’ to account for the universe’s stability. Hubble had demonstrated that this cosmological term wasn’t needed, and that Einstein’s own instincts had been right.

To examine [ɪg'zæmɪn] – изучать, рассмат-ривать Observatory [əb'zɜːvətrɪ] Prestigious [pres'tɪʤəs] To house –вме-щать, содержать Fussy ['fʌsɪ] подвижный, беспокойный Nebula – nebuale (pl) ['nebjulə; 'nebjuliː] – туманность Cepheid [ˈsɛfiːɪd] – цефеида, класс пуль-сирующих переменных звёзд с довольно точной зависимостью период /светимость, названный в честь звезды δ Цефея Luminous ['luːmɪnəs] – светящийся, ярко освещенный To spot – заметить Technique [tek'niːk ] – техника, метод Way outside – далеко за пределами (way в данном случае усилитель, ср. This is way too much) To anticipate [æn'tɪsɪpeɪt] – ожидать Siren ['saɪərən] To approach – приближаться To drop – падать, понижаться Shift – изменение, сдвиг, смещение Red-shifting – красное смещение To predict – предсказывать Static ['stætɪk]