2. Read and translate the text about the Internet

The Internet (or the Global Worldwide Network) has had a relatively brief, but explosive history. It grew out of an experiment begun in the 1960's by the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD wanted to create a computer network that would continue to function in the event of a disaster, such as a nuclear war. If part of the network were damaged or destroyed, the rest of the system still had to work. That network was ARPANET, which linked U.S. scientific and academic researchers. It was the forerunner of today's Internet.

In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created NSFNET, a series of networks for research and education communication. NSFNET grew rapidly as people discovered its potential, and as new software applications were created to make access easier. As commercial firms and other regional network providers have taken over the operation of the major Internet arteries, NSF has withdrawn from the backbone business.

Today the Internet is a global collection of many different types of computers and computer networks that are linked together. Just as a telephone enables you to talk to someone on the other side of the earth who also has a phone, the Internet enables a person to sit at his computer and exchange information with other computers and computer users anyplace in the world. The Internet allows information to flow through many different interconnected computer networks. As messages travel, each network that is reached contains information that assists in connecting to the adjacent network. The final destination may be in a different city or country.

What can people locate on the Internet? It offers a rapidly growing collection of information, with topics ranging from medicine to science and technology. It features exhaustive material on parts as well as research material for students and recreation, entertainment, sports, shopping, and employment opportunities. The Internet provides access to almanacs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and maps. Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides, virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of Google Scholar. In distance education, help with homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both formal and informal education.

A common resource provided by the Internet is a worldwide system for sending and receiving electronic mail, known as E-mail. In fact, E-mail represents a large portion of all Internet traffic and is for many the only Internet resource they use. Unlike the regular mail, E-mail often reaches its destination, even on other continents, in minutes or less unless some part of the network is heavily congested or temporarily out of order.

Another popular service is called Usenet. Usenet offers access to newsgroups for group discussions on specific topics. Some newsgroups focus on buying or selling various consumer items. There are thousands of newsgroups, and once a user has gained access to Usenet, there is no cost to subscribe to them.

One of the original Internet goals was global information sharing. What help is available when one does not know where a subject may be located within the Internet? Just as we locate a phone number by using a telephone directory, a user may find locations of interest on the Internet by first gaining access to what are known as search sites. The user supplies a word or a phrase; the site then replies with a list of Internet locations where information can be found. Generally, the search is free and takes only a few seconds! The part of the Internet called World Wide Web (or. Web) allows authors to use an old-fashioned idea – that of footnotes – in a new way.

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web, or just the Web, interchangeably, but the two terms are not synonymous. The World Wide Web is a global set of documents, images and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs allow providers to symbolically identify services and clients to locate and address web servers, file servers, and other databases that store documents and provide resources and access them using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the primary carrier protocol of the Web.

World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, let users navigate from one web page to another via hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content including games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like Yahoo! and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information.

The Web has also enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial cost and many cost-free services are available. Businesses and other organizations have become interested in the Web as a means to advertise their products or services as well as to offer other kinds of information.

Another common service of the Internet is the Internet Chat. Chat allows a group of people, using aliases, to send messages to one another immediately. While used by a variety of age groups, it is especially popular among young people. Once connected, the user is brought into contact with a large number of other users from all around the world. So-called chat rooms, or chat channels, are created that feature a particular theme, such as science fiction, movies, sports, or romance. All the messages typed within a chat room appear almost simultaneously on the computer screens of all participants for that chat room. Chat rooms are usually active 24 hours a day.

Social networks have become very popular recently. A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, common interest, financial exchange, relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.

Internet telephony is another common communications service made possible by the creation of the Internet. VoIP stands for Voice-over-Internet Protocol, referring to the protocol that underlies all Internet communication. In recent years many VoIP systems have become as easy to use and as convenient as a normal telephone. The benefit is that, as the Internet carries the voice traffic, VoIP can be free or cost much less than a traditional telephone call, especially over long distances and especially for those with always-on Internet connections such as cable or ADSL.

Streaming media refers to the fact that many existing radio and television broadcasters promote Internet "feeds" of their live audio and video streams (for example, the BBC). They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable media player to be listened to on the move.

Webcams can be seen as an even lower-budget extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the picture is usually either small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises. Video chat rooms and video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound.

The Internet can now be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, especially through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet from anywhere there is a wireless network supporting that device's technology. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available.

Notes:

CBeebies is a television channel produced by the BBC aimed at children 6 years and under.

Google Scholar is a freely accessible Web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.