Tasks and exercises

1. Answer the following questions:

a) What was Edwin Hubble’s main focus of attention when he worked at Mount Wilson Observatory?

b) What did Harlow Shapley think about nebulae and the Milky Way?

c) What technique did Shapley use in his investigations?

d) What did Hubble discover about the Andromeda nebula?

e) What is red shifting?

f) How does the red shift show that the universe is expanding?

g) In what way did Hubble’s work affect Einstein’s theory? What happened to the cosmological constant Einstein had introduced?

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

a) “to have smth inside or as a part”;

b) “to explain smth”;

c) “to consider, study, look at smth very carefully”;

d) “very large or important”;

e) “the act of paying special attention to smth”;

f) “probable, expected”;

g) “physical substance”;

h) “unexpected, surprising, strange”;

i) “to expect smth”.

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

a) to calculate: accurately/exactly, according to;

b) standard (adj): become standard, almost/fairly standard;

c) to anticipate (usually in the passive): be widely/keenly anticipated;

d) to expand: considerably/greatly/gradually/rapidly;

e) to contract [kən'trækt]: to contract a muscle, the universe is contracting;

f) stable: extremely/highly, more or less/reasonably;

g) to demonstrate: to demonstrate smth experimentally/graphically, clearly/vividly.

4. Fill in the gaps:

These compounds are extremely ____. Glass ____ as it cools. The discovery of a particle resembling the Higgs boson was the most keenly _____ scientific event of the year. The amount was accurately ____ according to the number of particles. Our study clearly _____ that these particles can be detected empirically. Such organisms rarely live in completely ____ environments. This is a fairly ____ method of assessing experimental results.

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

6. In the text you can find the sentence “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”, in which two parallel processes are confronted (“чем…, тем…”). Make up 4 similar sentences in which two phenomena are compared, then translate them into Russian and ask your groupmates to translate them back into English.

7. Translate into English:

a) Используя цефеиды как стандартизированные источники света, Хаббл вычислил, что галактика была в три раза больше, по сравнению с существовавшими на тот момент оценками экспертов.

b) Изучая туманность Андромеды, Хаббл понял, что свет, идущий от нее, был чуть краснее, чем следовало ожидать.

c) Объяснение было ошеломительным: вся вселенная расширяется.

d) 10 лет ранее, в общей теории относительности Эйнштейн предсказал, что вселенная или расширяется или сжимается.

e) Астрономы утверждали, что вселенная стабильна, поэтому Эйнштейн добавил космологическую константу, чтобы объяснить эту стабильность.

f) Хаббл продемонстрировал, что космологическая константа была не нужна и чутье не обмануло Эйнштейна.

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

Wilhelm Röntgen ['wɪlhelm 'rɔntjən]

Some people are prolific¹ problem solvers. Among the problems Wilhelm Röntgen studied were the curious electrical characteristics of quartz [kwɔːts], the influence of pressure on the way that fluids refract light, the modification of the planes of polarised light by electromagnetic forces and the way oil spreads on water. But he is best remembered for discovering X-rays.

Born: 1845, Prussia ['prʌʃə] (now Germany).

Education: University of Zurich ['z(j)uərɪk].

Major achievement: discovered X-rays.

Died: 1923, Munich ['mjuːnɪk], Germany.

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

With a Dutch mother and a German father, Röntgen was born in Germany, but moved to the Netherlands ['neðələndz] when he was three years old. He showed no particular skills while at school, but in his spare time enjoyed studying nature and building machines. Not surprisingly, when he had the opportunity of going to university he studied engineering, but soon switched to physics and in time became Professor of Physics at Würzburg ['vɜːts buəg]. In 1895 he was studying what happened when he passed an electric discharge through a chamber containing gas of extremely low pressure. Previous work had shown that doing this with very high voltages could generate a stream of particles that became known as the cathode ray tubes in conventional television screens, and now we call the particles electrons. On the evening of 8 November 1895, Röntgen enclosed the discharge tube in a thick black carton to exclude all light. When he turned off all the lights in the room, a paper plate coated with barium platinocyanide suddenly became fluorescent. He soon found that the radiation causing this was emitted when cathode rays struck the glass end of the tube, and that these rays had a much greater range in air than did the cathode rays. The plate glowed even when it was two metres from the tube. Intrigued by these rays, Röntgen placed objects of different thickness in their path and found that they exposed photographic plates to varying degrees. Then one day he placed his wife’s hand just in front of a photographic plate and shone the rays on it for a short time. When he developed the plate, the result was stunning. There was a ghostly outline of the hand, but the plate also revealed an image of the bones inside her hand and a clear mark caused by the ring she was wearing. It was the first ‘Röntgenogram’ ever taken, and gave doctors an unprecedented ability to look inside people’s bodies. In further experiments, Röntgen went on to discover that the new rays were produced when cathode rays hit a material object. Because the nature of these rays was unknown, he called them X-rays. Later, Max von Laue ['lauə] (1879-1960) and his pupils showed that, like light, X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation. The difference is that they have a shorter wavelength than visible light.

Particular [pə'tɪkjələ] – особенный Opportunity [ˌɔpə'tjuːnətɪ] – благоприятная возможность, случай To switch – переключиться In time – со временем Discharge ['dɪsʧɑːʤ] – эл. разряд Cathode ['kæθəud] – катод To enclose – помещать, запирать, вкладывать Carton ['kɑːt(ə)n] –картонная коробка, картон Plate – фотопластинка, стереотип To coat – покрывать Barium ['beərɪəm] Platinocyanide ['plætinəu ˌsaɪənaɪd] Fluorescent [flɔː'res(ə)nt] – светящийся Range – предел, диапазон, дальность To glow – светиться, сиять, озарять To intrigue [ɪn'triːg] To vary ['veərɪ] –изменяться, быть разнообразным To develop – (зд.) проявить Stunning – потрясающий Ghostly – призрачный Outline – очертание Röntgenogram [' rɔntjənəgræm] Unprecedented – [ʌn'presɪd(ə)ntɪd] беспрецедентный