Text: Scientific and Technological Progress Before you read 1 Make a list of the household items you use at home. Which of them do you find it most difficult to do without? Why? 2 Science can be used for the good and for the bad. Discuss with your partner the pluses and minuses of technological progress. Use the following phrases to express your opinion:
A) Verbs connected with beliefs and opinions I’m convinced … [very strong feeling that you’re right] I’ve always held that … [used for very firm beliefs] I feel … [strong personal opinion] I reckon … [informal: usually an opinion about what is likely to happen] 1 suspect … [have a strong feeling about something negative] B) Phrases for expressing opinion In my view . In my opinion … [fairly formal] To my mind … [fairly informal] If you ask me … [informal] Example: I reckon there will be staggering pollution due to the scientific progress, etc. Reading 1 Now read the text to see if some of your predictions were correct. The achievement of science and technical revolution and our day-to-day By K. Siegbahn As the years go forward our life becomes faster, a lot of new things appear, our mind develops. It’s like a strong river which never ends to run and it is rapidly spreading all over the earth. Many centuries ago people even couldn’t imagine that we will be able to exchange information using telephone, fax. the Internet as fast as they couldn’t think that there are a lot of planets except our earth and that people can fly their. Nowadays we cannot imagine our life without such imentions like lamps, ovens, central heating and others. People have invented the things to make our life easier. A great invention such as transport plays one of the most important roles in our life. We live in flats, can appear in different point of earth within a day. can say hello to people who live in another point of the world. All those things are a product of technical progress and it doesn’t stop to grow and develop. Nowadays we live surrounded by machines and other inventions. And with new inventions we become happier because nearly everything is made by machine not by ourselves. And from day to day appear more and more new things. And we don’t think about how the first inventions were created. The only thing we know that we never will return to the life which people lived a lot of centuries ago because there is no way back. Everything is handy. We use at home vacuum cleaners to clean the flat, ovens to cook, lifts to walk down in our houses, lamps to make our flats light …. We even don’t think about when and where and who invented them. Our century is a century of developing informational connection. Faxes, TV. the Internet, and telephone became the most popular way of getting and sending information. One of the greatest inventions of the century is a computer. It’s the coup in the technology. When Charles Babbage (1792-1871). a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University invented the first calculating machine in 1812 he could hardly imagined the situation we find ourselves today. Computer becomes like a brain of human but the only thing it cannot do is to feel. As everything computers also develop. The possibilities of them are so wide. They can do more than 500000 sums in a fraction of a second. Nowadays computers can pa wages, reserve seats on planes, compose music. Also everybody knows the word CD-Rom, that stores information on a disk to be read by a computer, e-mail, which becomes one of the ways to exchange information, the Internet — a network that is a way to get information, to communicate with people, to find everything you need. More and more people become Internet users because we can do so many things on the Internet. You can chat, find job, pay bills, get music, buy something, exchange information with other people in each point of the earth by e-mail and a lot of other functions. It became a usual thing to be connected to the Internet. It attracts people by a wide variety of different kinds of information. Of course I use a lot of other things of technology at home. The question about technical progress is very wide and it’s impossible to say about all inventions. And in conclusion I want to say that the technical progress won’t stop and the machines will substitute everything except one the human.
