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Файл:Your majesty science. Учебное пособие
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e) to eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink); buy (goods or services); use up (a
resource) _______________________
f) relating to a festival, especially Christmas __________________________
g) to protect and care for (someone) lovingly; hold (something) dear
__________
h) causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing
________________________
i) to feel sad, repentant, or disappointed over (something that one has done or
failed to do) _________________________________________________
3. Complete the sentences with the right form of one of the words from the
previous exercise.
a) She immediately ___________ her words.
b) Vast amounts of food and drink were ________________.
spill.
c) Whose responsibility is it to _____________ of scrap materials?
d) I ________________ the letters she wrote.
e) It is ________________ how short memories are
f) The group carries out _________________ in geochemistry.
g) The ____________ of my initials on the tree evoked sweet memories.
h) The _____________ season is fast approaching.
i) An _____________ has been launched into the potential impact of the oil
4. Translate from Russian into English.
Дизайн вашего сада
Мы привыкли слышать новое модное слово «дизайн». Все стали часто
использовать такие словосочетания, как: дизайн квартир, штор, ногтей,
спальни, платья, но есть еще и такое понятие, как дизайн ландшафта. Такое
красивое слово можно расшифровать как отличный впечатляющий пейзаж,
который будет радовать глаз. И если вы решили превратить свою дачу в нечто
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необыкновенное, то стоит заняться дизайном ландшафта. Озеленение участка –
это один из самых важных моментов в дизайне ландшафта. Для озеленения
участка важен эдакий творческий беспорядок, который выглядит очень
натуралистично и эффектно. А для придания этой самой натуралистичности все
чаще стали использовать дикорастущие травы и декоративные растения, уход
за которым задача не из легких.
http://promdesigns.ru/
SELF-ASSESSMENT VIII
1. Translate the article using a dictionary.
STATE OF THE ART
A Thermostat That's Clever, Not Clunky
Tony Fadell and his new company, Nest, have decided to reinvent a tech item
that hasn't seen much innovation in decades: the thermostat. Don't snicker. This isn't
trivial. According to Nest, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats in this country
alone; 10 million more are bought each year.
Half of your home's energy is controlled by this ugly, beige tool. Most people
never even bother to program their programmable thermostats. As a result, their
houses actually use more energy than homes without them.
The Nest Learning Thermostat ($250) doesn't introduce just one radical
rethinking of the thermostat; it introduces four of them.
RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It's round. Its screen
is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color
screen glows orange when it's heating, blue when it's cooling; it turns on when you
approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody's nearby.
RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it's online. It can download
software updates. You can program it on a Web site. You can also use a free iPhone
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or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and
change it – to warm up the house before you arrive, for example.
RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself -and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring
to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat – at bedtime, when you
leave for work, and so on.
A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how
long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is
intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for
example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn't.)
Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual
adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidity
were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.
RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let's face it, $250 is a lot to pay for a
thermostat. But Nest says that you'll recoup that through energy savings in less than
two years.
The New York Times
2. Make a presentation on Russian design achievements to prove that,
great though they may be, Italy, Germany and Japan certainly do not have a
monopoly on modern design culture.
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UNIT NINE
1. For centuries, mathematics has been the main driver of science and
technology, and the results have transformed our world. What facts can you
present to support the idea?
2. Read the article and mark the statements as true (T) or false (F).
a) The available road space today is quite enough to accommodate all modern
vehicles. ___________
b) There is only one reason for traffic jams today, and it is the great number of
cars on roads._______
c) Maths has nothing to do with traffic jams._______
d) Adaptive cruise control appears to be a useful tool in providing the
“equilibrium spacing”._______
e) An ACC-using vehicle is quite a recent innovation._______
f) Some drivers are unwilling to use ACC.______
Jam today
Mathematicians make headway in understanding traffic congestion
…At current rates, the number of cars and light trucks
worldwide is set to double over the next 20 years, from today’s
estimated 900m. Bashing out new cars is relatively easy;
building new roads to accommodate them is anything but.
Figuring out how to use the available road space more efficiently will thus be
necessary to keep ever more cars from languishing in jams, and spewing out
prodigious quantities of carbon dioxide as they do.
Scientists have been trying to bring order, or at least predictability, to
motorway mêlées for decades. They assumed the familiar “stop-and-go” waves of
congestion were due to the sheer volume of traffic. More recently, mathematical
models have suggested they may actually be down to drivers’ behaviour. With cars
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moving fluidly in a tight pack even a seemingly innocuous change of lanes may cause
a tiny disruption which is propagated backwards for many miles.
Now, in one of the Royal Society papers, Jorge Laval, from the Georgia
Institute of Technology in America, and Ludovic Leclerc, of Université de Lyon in
France, finger timid and aggressive driver behaviour as the main culprit. To arrive at
their conclusion they looked at actual traffic on a 600-metre (a third of a mile) stretch
of freeway lanes in Los Angeles, and another near San Francisco, and created a
model to match the observed data. They found that vehicle speeds drop to zero if just
a few drivers accept shorter distances between their car and the one in front, and a
handful of others in the same lane prefer a greater gap, relative to the “equilibrium
spacing” which in theory ensures a steady ride.
One way to maintain this ideal gap would be more widespread deployment of
adaptive cruise control (ACC), which enables partly automated driving. Some of
these systems use radar to keep a car at a set distance from the one in front. In another
paper, Arne Kesting, of Technische Universität Dresden in Germany, and colleagues
calculated that a 1% increase in the number of ACC-using vehicles would free up
0.3% of road capacity. Such systems have been around since the late 1990s but many
motorists remain leery of relinquishing control to a computer. Until that changes they
had better steel themselves for more jams.
The Economist
2. Translate the article from Russian into English.
А знаете ли вы, что рыбы умеют считать до четырех? Этот интересный
математический факт подтвердили итальянские ученые. Сотрудник
университета Падуи Кристиан Агрилло, который участвовал в проведении
эксперимента, сообщил: «Мы получили доказательства того, что рыбы
наделены рудиментарными математическими способностями». Прежде уже
было известно, что рыбы умеют находить отличие между большими и
маленькими косяками. Данный опыт показал, что рыбы могут посчитать,
сколько рыб плавает вокруг них. Аналогичными математическими
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способностями обладают обезьяны, дельфины и некоторые люди с
ограниченными возможностями.
http://znaeteli.ru/stati/interesnye-matematicheskie-fakty/
SELF-ASSESSMENT IX
1. Translate the article using a dictionary.
How maths can improve your drinking water
Mathematical modelling can help keep the stuff that comes out of your taps
clean and fresh
In July, my wife Avril and I celebrated our 40th wedding
anniversary in Barbados. We joked with the hotel waiter that we
only came for the tap water, which is amazingly good. We found
out why when we visited Harrison’s cave. Barbados is mostly fossilised coral, which
acts like a giant filter for rainwater. So the tap water is very clean, with a tangy
mineral taste.
Several years ago we went to Slovenia, and were invited to join a group of
Chinese karstologists visiting the spectacular caves there. Karst is rugged limestone,
all jagged edges and collapsed holes. What’s all this geology got to do with maths?
Well, I was idly reading a mathematics research journal and came across an article
about karst.
Great stuff for mathematicians and geologists, to be sure, but why should
anybody else care about karst?
The answer is: groundwater. Much of the water we drink, and the water that
industries use, comes from groundwater.
Because we rely heavily on groundwater, contamination is a serious problem.
Industrial waste, excess fertiliser running off fields, landfill sites for everyday
rubbish, and dozens of other sources can cause undesirable chemicals to get into our
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groundwater. To some extent, karst aquifers can clean themselves, given time, but it’s
not clear whether they can cope with the level of contamination that is common
today. So scientists need to understand how water flows through the porous karst
geology.
Traditionally, they use mathematical models of fluid flow through a porous
substance. The usual models assume that the rock is equally porous everywhere,
because until recently no one knew how to include more realistic effects, such as
cracks in the rock, surface sinkholes, and springs. The sums were simply too difficult,
even using powerful computers. But those cracks are more important than the porous
rock when we want to know how contaminants move from place to place.
That’s where all the stuff about Beavers-Joseph interfaces comes in. It’s how
the modellers deal with holes and cracks in porous rock. After many years of effort,
the mathematicians who work in this area have discovered a good way to set up
realistic models in a computer, and calculate how effective the rock is at filtering out
chemical nasties and keeping itself clean.
The Economist
2. Write an essay to support the following statement: “Mathematics makes
the world go round”.
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UNIT TEN
1. Scan the article to state the reasons for a wider use of renewable sources
of energy.
2. Read the article again and complete it with a sentence A-E. There is one
sentence you don’t need.
A. In order to exploit renewable sources of energy it is often necessary to
make a considerable capital investment.
B. Geothermal energy is also becoming more and more widely used in some
arrears.
C. This airborne water ultimately falls as rain, creating rivers which may be
dammed to produce hydroelectric power.
D. This estimate, however, does not allow for economic and environmental
constraints and is therefore somewhat misleading.
E. Indeed, it is the perceived notion of sustainability that is driving
governments around the world to introduce legislation promoting the use of
renewable energy.
Renewable Energy
Climate change, coupled with concerns about high oil and energy prices, is
driving a global trend towards the increased use of renewable energy. Unlike fossil
fuels which are rapidly being depleted, renewable energy sources such as sunlight
and wind are naturally replenished and therefore sustainable. (1)_____________
Most sources of renewable energy originate either directly or indirectly from
the sun. For example, both wind and wave power derive their energy indirectly from
the sun. When solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth it is dissipated around the
globe in the form of winds and ocean currents. The wind interacts with the oceans
and transfers mechanical energy to water thus creating waves. In addition, solar
energy promotes evaporation of water from the oceans. (2)_________________
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Furthermore, solar energy drives the photosynthesis necessary for the plants
that are used to create biofuels. Currently, only about 18% of the world’s energy
demand is supplied from renewable energy sources. However, there is great potential
to increase this contribution. Indeed, it has been estimated that the technical potential
of renewable energy is more than 18 times that of current global primary energy
demand. (3)_________________________ Owing to constraints, such as economic
competitiveness, the potential that is likely to be realized in practice will be only a
fraction of this value.
(4)_________________This is particularly the case with large infrastructure
projects such as hydroelectric or tidal barrage schemes. To be economically viable,
such projects must absorb large capital costs and still be able to compete on price
with traditional sources of energy – something which in most cases it is difficult to
do.
Peggy Daniels Becker, Alternative Energy
3. Are you optimistic about the use of alternative sources of energy? Make
a list of advantages and disadvantages of the current trends in energy producing
technologies.
4. Translate the article from Russian into English.
Биоэнергетика в России – одна из самых молодых и наиболее
перспективных отраслей экономики. К понятию «биоэнергетика» относится
все, что так или иначе связано с получением в промышленных масштабах
энергии из различного возобновляемого сырья биологического происхождения.
Такое сырье и его производные обычно называют биотопливом. Биотопливо
бывает твердым, жидким или газообразным. Оно может изготавливаться из
самого разного сырья, такого как древесные отходы, отходы
сельскохозяйственного производства (лузга, шелуха, солома, тростник),
бытовые отходы, канализационные стоки. В России, с ее богатыми запасами
нефти, газа и другого ископаемого сырья, к этой теме долго относились, как к
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своего рода, забаве для энтузиастов от науки. Лишь в самом начале XXI века
темой производства биотоплива начал интересоваться бизнес.
http://www.wood-pellets.com/cgbin/cms/index.cgi?ext=content&pid=955&lang=1
SELF-ASSESSMENT X
1. Translate the artcle using a dictionary.
Geothermal Power Could Become a Good Alternative for Making Electricity
It now makes up just a sliver of the electricity
generation pie. But experts at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology say that enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)
could have far wider applications and be especially useful in
times of high energy prices and carbon constraints. Not only are the systems much
cleaner than fossil fuels but they also provide a continuous flow of energy — all at
competitive prices.
Geothermal energy is a very large resource and has the potential to be a
significant contributor to the energy needs of the world. Geothermal now provides
less than 1% of the world’s power, although it could supply as much as 20% in the
coming decades.
How Geothermal Power Works? To get there the tools to perfect deep drilling
and water flow through the underground navigation system are needed.
Geothermal resources are available nationwide in the USA. But the highestgrade sites are in western states where hot rocks are closer to the surface, requiring
less drilling and thereby reducing exploration costs. Once there, those wells must
then be linked with natural or induced fractures in the rock to allow the water to flow
through.
Water is pumped via the wells through these fractures in the hot rock and up to
the surface to run electric generators at the surface. Unlike conventional fossil-fuel
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