Grammar exercises

6. Read, translate and pay attention to the usage of modal verb can and its equivalent:

1. It’s such a bad copy! I can’t file it. 2. She can’t come on Monday. She can only send us five copies. 3. Can’t you settle this problem? 4. You can phone Mr Benson, my business partner. 5. Will you be able to do this work tomorrow? 6. I don’t think I can go on holidays this year, I can’t afford it. 7. I wasn’t able to find my way anywhere when I first came to this town. 8. I hope to be able to work abroad when I leave university. 9. They can’t all be lying. 10. They are able to appreciate your kindness.11. Can they have prepared their lessons so quickly? 12. They can’t have performed network analysis so quickly. 13. One cannot fail to observe that the advance in technique grows more rapid. 14. One can accept his (her) cheques only with a bank card. 15. Paper books are cheap and efficient while electronic books can store much more information – a thousand paperbacks on one disk – and manage the information in ways paperbacks simply can’t. Twenty volumes of the Oxford dictionary, which weighs 66 kilos and has 21, 710 pages can be put on one disk called CD ROM, which means “compact disk read only memory”. Its contents cannot be altered.

7. Fill in: can / to be able to:1. The ancient dream of human flight … be traced in many legends. 2. Our ancient ancestors created stone axes … to hunt efficiently, otherwise they … 3. An Italian Leonardo da Vinci was a student in Florence. He … draw, design buildings, write music. 4. Plank found that he … derive a mathematical formula by making an assumption that a body cannot radiate energy continuously. 5. It is stylish … to speak a foreign language. 6. Higher education … not be called complete without at least one foreign language. 7. With introduction of e-mail and mobile phones, managers … to do more and more of the activities themselves without a secretary.

8. Read and translate, pay attention to the usage of modal verb may and its equivalent.

1. Jane may (might) still be in her office, but she usually leaves before six. 2. You were lucky. You might have failed your exam. 3. They might be more attentive in class. 4. Of course a miracle may happen and you may be a great scientist. 5. You may come at any time that is convenient to you. 6. His name is Starfield. You may have heard of him. 7. Tools made of cast-iron and then of steel allowed hard materials such as stone to be treated, which led to the development of civil engineering. 8. Information such as exactly where you are, to the precision of a few meters, may be available through a mobile phone. This may be extremely useful if you got lost, say, when driving a car. 9. Today most scientists think comets may have created from a huge cloud of particles that surrounds our entire solar system.

9. Read and translate, pay attention to the usage of modal verb must and its equivalent. Ask questions to the words in bold:

1. I have to work from 8.30 till 5.30 every day. 2. He does not want to go to the cinema with us. He must have seen the film. 3. Paying by credit card you don’t have to carry around large amounts of cash. 4. This evidence must provide some new facts. 5. These phenomena must be distinguished carefully. 6. There must be some force operating to keep bodies moving in the way they do. 7. There is no certainty that molecules in a gas must behave in the same way as in a liquid. 8. We must be able to predict the properties of a virus. 9. Any space travel must provide means for a subsequent return to the Earth.10. Since survival is the principal problem for living on the moon, early settlers will have to build an atmosphere like the earth’s. They will have to produce food and oxygen and find water. They will have to explore the possibilities for commercial development and continue scientific investigation. 11. We have to realize that our whole history is the history of technology, regardless of the exact form it took. Today an enormous amount of personal and business communication takes place by telephone, and fax machine, and most long-distance calls travel via satellite. Fifty years ago telephones could only work between places connected by continuous wires which had to cross the oceans; the world’s longest cable still stretches underwater for fifteen thousand kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. 12. The huge quantity of information that people have to deal with has rocketed with the advent of satellite and cable television.