Иностранный язык (английский язык). Сборник упражнений по переводу и разговорной речи. Учебное пособие

The author tells us about the / describes (depicts) / characterizes / criticizes/ praises

Главную часть следует посвятить описанию и анализу события, ситуации, героя или проблемы, о которых идёт речь в тексте. В изложении эта часть должна быть наиболее точно передана.

The article/text begins with

First (At first, At the beginning of the) Then follows …

Next … After that

The author concludes that / summarizes the … To sum up /To summarize/ To conclude Finally /In the end…

Заключительная часть – Conclusion

Заключение должно содержать выводы At the end of the article the author sums up...

I want to end this by repeating / stressing / emphasizing / noting that … . In conclusion I’d like to say that .

Мнение – Opinion, View

In my view / In my opinion / I think …

The article/text is interesting (not interesting), of importance (of little importance), valuable (invaluable), up-to-date (out-of-date), useful (useless)… Для тренировки данного навыка предлагаем подготовить пересказ следующих текстов, соответствующих объёму и уровню сложности экзаменационных заданий. Для проверки понимания ответьте на вопросы

в конце текста.

ТЕКСТЫ ДЛЯ ПЕРЕСКАЗА

Retell text 1.

Thomas Alva Edison

Inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. He was the last of the seven children of Samuel and Nancy Edison. Thomas’s father was an exiled political activist from Canada. His mother, an accomplished schoolteacher, was a major influence in Thomas’ early life. In 1854, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, where Edison attended public school for a total of 12 weeks. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction,

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he was called «difficult» by his teacher. His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home.

At age 12, Edison set out to put much of that education to work. He convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line. Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car. During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire.

One day he saved a child from a runaway train. The child’s father repaid Edison by training him as a telegraph operator. As a telegraph operator, Thomas became interested in communications, which would be the focus of many of his inventions.

In 1869, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention. In 1870, Thomas Edison set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey, and employed several machinists. Then his laboratory moved to Menlo Park.

The first great invention developed by Edison was the tin foil phonograph. In total, Edison has 1093 patents. The most famous of his inventions are the phonograph, the electric bulb and motion picture camera.

Although he did not invent the first electric light, Edison made the first practical electric light bulb that could be manufactured and used in the home. He also invented other items that were needed make the light bulb practical for use in homes, including safety fuses and off/off switches for light sockets.

He died in 1931 being completely deaf.

Вопросы к тексту Answer the questions:

1.When was Edison born?_______________________

2.Did he go to school?___________________________

3.Who taught him to be a telegrapher and why? ______________

4.What was his first invention?______________________

5.What is Menlo park? _______________________________

6.How many patents does Edison have? _____________________

Retell text 2.

Apple’s Early History

Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley.

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Wozniak had been dabbling in computer-design for some time when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an eye for the future, insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born.

Apple did not begin to take off until 1977, when the Apple II debuted at a local computer trade show. The first personal computer came in a plastic case and included colour graphics.

In 1980 the Apple III was released and Apple began to sell computers abroad. In 1981, things got a bit more difficult. A saturated market made it more difficult to sell computers. Wozniak was injured in a plane crash. He took a leave of absence and returned only briefly. Jobs became chair of Apple computer in March.

In 1981, IBM released its first PC and the competition became very tough. Jobs began to realize that Apple would have to become a «grown-up» company and decided to hire a professional manager. He chose John Sculley, then president of Pepsi-Cola. In early 1983, Sculley became president and CEO of Apple. Jobs believed Sculley would help Apple «grow up,» but had no idea how right he would turn out to be. Eventually, it cost him his job.

On January 22nd, 1984, during the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Apple aired its infamous 60-second commercial introducing the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, the Orwellian scene depicted the IBM world being shattered by a new machine. Initially, the Mac sold very well, but by Christmas of 1984, people were becoming fed up with its small amount of RAM, and lack of hard drive connectivity. It was around the beginning of 1985 that Jobs and Sculley began to argue and the board took the part of Sculley, Steve Jobs was dismissed by the end of the year.

Вопросы к тексту Answer the questions:

1)Did Steve Jobs know Steve Woznyak well?_______________________

2)When was Apple I made?___________________________

3)What happened in 1981? ______________

4)Who is John Sculley?______________________

5)WhenwasthefirstMacintoshadvertisedandhow?__________________

6)When did Jobs leave Apple and why? _____________________

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Retell text 3.

Nicola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in what is now Smiljan, Croatia. After studying at the Realschule, Austria; and the University of Prague during the 1870s, Tesla moved to Budapest, where for a time he worked at the Central Telephone Exchange. It was while in Budapest that the idea for the induction motor first came to Tesla, but after several years of trying to gain interest in his invention, at age 28 Tesla decided to leave Europe for America.

In 1884 Tesla arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on his back and a letter of introduction to famed inventor and business mogul Thomas Edison. Edison hired Tesla, and the two men were soon working tirelessly alongside each other, making improvements to Edison’s inventions. However, several months later, the two parted ways due to a conflicting business-scientific relationship.

In 1885 Tesla received funding for the Tesla Electric Light Company and was tasked by his investors to develop improved arc lighting. Setting straight to work, by the end of the year, Tesla had successfully filed several patents for AC-based inventions. Tesla continued his work and would patent several more inventions during this period, including the «Tesla coil,» which laid the foundation for wireless technologies and is still used in radio technology today.

InadditiontohisACsystemandcoil,throughouthiscareer,Tesladiscovered, designed and developed ideas for a number of other important inventions— most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor. He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology, remote control and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery.

Unfortunately, Nicola Tesla was not successful as a businessman and in 1917 he declared bankruptcy of his company. After this he continued working as a consultant and living in poverty.

He died in 1943 in the age of 86 in New York.

Retell text 4.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London. At a young age, he displayed signs of high intelligence, which some of his teachers recognized, but did not necessarily respect. When Turing attended the well-known independent Sherborne School at the age of 13, he became particularly interested in math and science.

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After Sherborne, Turing enrolled at King’s College (University of Cambridge) in Cambridge, England, studying there from 1931 to 1934. As a result of his dissertation, in which he proved the central limit theorem, Turing was elected a fellow at the school upon his graduation.

In 1936, Turing delivered a paper, «On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,» in which he presented the notion of a universal machine (later called the “Universal Turing Machine,» and then the «Turing machine») capable of computing anything that is computable: The central concept of the modern computer was based on Turing’s paper.

Over the next two years, Turing studied mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938, he returned to Cambridge, and then took a part-time position with the Government Code and Cypher School, a British code-breaking organization.

During World War II, Turing was a leading participant in wartime codebreaking, particularly that of German ciphers. Turing’s contributions to the code-breaking process didn’t stop there: He also wrote two papers about mathematical approaches to code-breaking, which became so important that British authorities waited until April 2012 to release them to the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

Turing moved to London in the mid-1940s, and began working for the National Physical Laboratory, holding high-rank positions in many academic institutions. Then he was barred from working, arrested and had to undergo a special treatment because of his homosexuality.

Turing died on June 7, 1954. Following a postmortem exam, it was determined that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning which was regarded as a suicide.

Turing was also ranked 21st on the BBC nationwide poll of the «100 Greatest Britons» in 2002. By and large, Turing has been recognized for his impact on computer science, with many crediting him as the «founder» of the field.

Retell text 5.

When was the first computer invented?

The word «computer» was first recorded as being used in 1613 and originally was used to describe a human who performed calculations or computations. The definition of a computer remained the same until the end of the 19th century, when the industrial revolution gave rise to machines whose primary purpose was calculating.

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The first mechanical computer, created by Charles Babbage in 1822, doesn’t really resemble what most would consider a computer today. The Difference Engine could perform simple calculations and compile mathematical tables. Babbage later conceived the Analytical Engine, a device that could perform any calculation, but was unable to construct a prototype during his lifetime.

The Z1 was originally created by Germany’s Konrad Zuse in his parents’ living room in 1936 to 1938 and is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable (modern) computer and really the first functional computer.

The next major breakthrough in computing occurred years later, in 1936, when Alan Turing introduced the idea of the modern programmable computer. This led to electromechanical computers in the late 1930s, devices that used electric switches and mechanical relays to work. They were soon replaced by all-electronic computers that first used vacuum tubes, but progressed to the use of transistors and then integrated circuits in the 1950s. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn’t have the computers we use today.

The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer, developed by Tommy Flowers, and first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages.

At the same time in the USA Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry began development of ABC (short for AtanasoffBerry Computer). Its development continued until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University).

The ABC was an electrical computer that used vacuum tubes for digital computation, including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU

The next step was the ENIAC invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943-1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons.

Retell text 6.

Vladimir Zworykin

ARussianinventor,VladimirZworykininventedthecathode-raytubecalledthe kinescope in 1929. Zworykin was one of the first to demonstrate a television system withallthefeaturesofmodernpicturetubes.Zworykinalsoinventedtheiconoscope in1923-atubefortelevisiontransmissionusedinthefirstcameras.Theiconoscope was later replaced but it laid the foundations for early television cameras.

Zworykin’s contributions to television were great. And while some may have called him Father of Television, Zworykin always said that television was the creation of hundreds of inventors and researchers.

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Vladimir Zworykin was born in Murom, 200 miles east of Moscow, and studied electrical engineering at the Imperial Institute of Technology. Boris Rosing, a professor in charge of laboratory projects, tutored Zworykin and introduced his student to his experiments of transmitting pictures by wire. Rosing and Zworykin exhibited a television system in 1910, using a mechanical scanner in the transmitter and the electronic Braun tube in the receiver.

From 1912 to 1914, Zworykin continued his education in Paris. During the First World War he served in the Signals Corps, and during the civil war he moved to White-controlled Omsk, where he worked on radio station equipment. In 1919, while Zworykin was on a diplomatic trip to the United States as a representative of Admiral Kolchak’s government, he learned of the White defeat in Siberia, and decided not to return to Russia.

After becoming famous in the 1930s, he visited Soviet Russia to help smooth negotiations for RCA (Radio Corporation of America), who wanted contracts for its products. The authorities were offering him all the support in research. With his relatives living in Russia, the temptation was big, but eventually Zworykin chose to stay in the US.

In 1967 together with his wife Zworykin traveled to his homeland for the last time in his life. There they reportedly eluded counter-intelligence officers to visit the city of Murom, where the scientist was born and which was a closed territory for foreigners at the time.

It’s told that, up until his death in 1982, Zworykin had a heavy Russian accent.

Retell text 7.

The best computer programmer of all the times

It seems like there are lots of programmers out there these days, and lots of really good programmers. But which one is the very best? One of the answers may be Donald Ervin Knuth.

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of the multivolume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the “father” of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process, He also popularized the asymptotic notation. Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system and the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

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Donald Knuth was born January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was a teacher in a Lutheran high school and a church organist. Don Knuth attended Lutheran high school and, in later life, also became a church organist. He got a scholarship to the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. Knuth was so good at mathematical studies at Case that the faculty awarded him an M.S. in mathematics when he finished his B.S. work.

While working on his PhD in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, Knuth also did private consulting, and wrote compilers for various computers. In January 1962, in his second year at Cal Tech, AddisonWesley asked him to write a book on compilers. Knuth was a good writer and had an instinct for trying to organize things, so he decided to tackle it. He used a quantitative rather than qualitative approach, and emphasized aesthetics—the creation of programs that are beautiful. The book grew longer as he wrote it, reaching 3,000 hand-written pages (the equivalent of 2,000 printed pages) by the time he finished the first draft of the 12 chapters in June 1965. This book brought him world fame.

Donald Knuth is now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, California.

Retell text 8.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was born on Dec. 26, 1791 in England. He became a mathematician, mechanical engineer, inventor, and philosopher. He had a lot of contributions to different scientific fields but his most famous work is probably coming up with the idea of a programmable computing device.

In fact, Charles Babbage is considered the “father of the computer” and is given credit for coming up with the first ever mechanical computer. It was very simple but it served as the blue print for other, more complex machines. Of course he had other works to his name in other fields and this is the reason he was often referred to as pre-eminent among other polymaths of his generation.

He got his education first in a Grammar school and then in Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduation he became a lecturer at the Royal Institution. A year after that, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816. For all his life he combined teaching with working on his own projects.

The main book of his life was Economy of Machinery which described what is now called the «Babbage principle». It pointed out commercial advantages available with more careful division of labour.

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His machines were considered as one of the very first mechanical computers ever to be invented. They were not actually used for computing but not due to a design flaw. It was rather due to lack of funding and some personality problems.

Babbage was the director in charge of building steam-powered machines and they did achieve some success; they also suggested that calculations could be done mechanically. For ten years after that, the government funded some of his projects but soon lost faith in him and the funding stopped.

While the machines he came up with were mechanical and bulky, they had a basic design that is similar to the modern computer. It is for this reason why he is often looked at as one of the pioneers of computers.

Charles Babbage died on Oct. 18, 1871.

Retell text 9.

Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – February 3, 1468) was a German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who invented the first printing press. Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionised the creation of books and helped make them affordable, ushering in a new era of affordable books and literature.

Gutenberg was born in the German city of Mainz. He started his working life as a merchant, but then moved into work as a blacksmith and goldsmith.

At one point, Gutenberg became heavily indebted due to a failed investment in holy mirrors. It is said he promised his creditors that they could have a share in his new printing press he was working on. It is also said the idea for the printing press, came like a flash of light, though this may have been an embellished story added at a later day.

The genius of Gutenberg’s printing press is that he incorporated various technologies from different fields into a practical and affordable way of printing books.Hisfirstmodelofaprintingpresswasrevealedinaround1440inStrasbourg.

This printing press was soon influential in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and age of scientific Enlightenment. It helped provide an economical way to share ideas and knowledge which was affordable for ordinary people.

The most influential book published by Gutenberg was the Gutenberg Bible in 1455. His printing presses were later used to mass produce Bibles – helping to spread the most influential book of the era. The Gutenberg Bible is acclaimed for its high quality of design and quality. 180 copies of the original Gutenberg Bible were produced, mostly on paper and some on vellum. Despite the genius of his invention, Gutenberg was never really able to financially capitalise on

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his invention, but the technology soon spread across Europe – especially to Venice and Italy, where printing played a key role in the Renaissance.

Ironically, since Church indulgences were the first thing Gutenberg printed, the printing press was also used in the Reformation. The great religious leader of that time, Martin Luther, had his book printed to be circulated widely.

Retell text 10.

History of Microsoft Inc.

Childhood friends, Paul Allen and Bill Gates are the co-founders of Microsoft. The pair were total computer geeks in an age when any access to computers was hard to come by. Allen and Gates skipped classes to live and breathe in their school’s computer room. Eventually, they hacked the school’s computer but instead of expulsion, the duo were offered unlimited computer time in exchange for helping to improve the computer’s performance. Bill Gates and Paul Allen even ran their own small company called Traf-O-Data and sold a computer to the city of Seattle for counting city traffic.

Later they moved to Boston and Bill quitted Harvard to focus completely on what he loved the most. In January 1975, Paul Allen read an article about the Altair 8800 microcomputer in Popular Electronics magazine. He showed the article to Bill. Bill Gates called MITS, the makers of the Altair, and offered his and Paul Allen’s services to write a version of the new BASIC programming language for the Altair. In eight weeks, Allen and Gates were able to demonstrate their program to MITS, who agreed to distribute and market the product under the name of Altair BASIC.

The Altair deal inspired Gates and Allen to form their own software company, and Microsoft was started on April 4, 1975, with Bill Gates as the first CEO.

On July 29, 1975, Bill Gates used the name «Microsoft» in a letter to Paul Allen to refer to their partnership. The name was registered with the secretary of state of New Mexico on November 26, 1976. In August 1977, the company opened their first international office in Japan, called ASCII Microsoft.

In 1981, the company incorporated in the state of Washington and became Microsoft Inc. Bill Gates was the President of the Company and the Chairman of the Board, and Paul Allen was the Executive VP.

Microsoft’s first wildly successful operating system was MS-DOS or Microsoft Disk Operating System, which Microsoft wrote for IBM in 1981, In 1983, Microsoft’s crowning achievement was released, Microsoft Windows was an operating system with a novel graphical user interface and a

multitasking environment for IBM computers.

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