On/offline activity. Speaking practice

Work in groups

I. Now we know many interesting facts from Alfred Nobel’s life. And you can have a great opportunity to find out: how his fund works nowadays.

Find the information from the Internet Resources about:

The foundation of the Nobel Prize Fund (the date, the place, some other facts);

The facts about the first Nobel Prize Winners (the name of the winners, the nationality, the year, and the fields of their activity);

About our compatriots (Jhores Alferov, Boris Pasternak, Lev Landau, Joseph Brodsky) and other Nobel Prize Winners in physics, literature, etc. (the name, the year, fields of activity, their family, some extraordinary facts from their life);

About the Nobel Prize Winners in 2007 in different fields of sciences (the name of the winners, the nationality, and the fields of their activity) and retell this interesting information to your groupmates.

Recommended resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhores_Alferov

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/index.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2007/evans-lecture.html

http://nobelprize.org/

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2007/index.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2007/

http://nobelprize.org/prize_announcements/economics/eco_questions_07.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Brodsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau

II. Write an interesting story about one of the Nobel Prize Winners and send the story to the teacher by e-mail.

Do revision test and also send it to the teacher.

 

Lesson 4

LEAD-IN

Can you guess which year these inventions were made?

1876 1886 1938 1940 1965 1971 1975 1976 1979 1995

Ballpoint pen CD colour TV dishwasher DVD e-mail

Mobile phone personal computer video recorder

How necessary are they in your life?

 

LEXICAL EXERCISES

Find suitable words to the following definitions:

Research, invention, inspiration, closet, bulb, to take a nap, wax, phonograph, genius, perspiration

subsidiary room in an apartment house;

something that someone has made, designed or created, that did not exist before;

outstanding abilities, talent, talent in the certain field of activity;

the condition of creative rise, inflow of a creative power;

the lighting or heating device of a various kind and the device;

to be in a condition of a light slumber;

solid substance that becomes liquid when it is heated. Wax is used, for example, to make candles;

the first device for mechanical record and reproduction of a sound;

the liquid allocated during physical activities, or during excitement;

the detailed study of something in order to discover new facts;

 

New words

Try to guess the meaning of the following definitions:

– someone who performs religious duties and ceremonies in some religions;

– a long stick with a weight at the end of it that hangs down and swings from side to side, especially in a large clock;

– the hot wet substance that is produced when water is heated;

– the part of a vehicle that produces power to make it move;

– someone who is patient, is able to wait for a long time or deal with a difficult situation without becoming angry or upset;

- a glass object with a very thin wire inside, that produces light, when it is connected to an electricity supply.

Priest, steam, pendulum, patient, bulb, engine.

Longman Exams Dictionary

SPEAKING PRACTICE

Reading

Now before reading an article, let’s remember Edison’s main idea about success, inspiration.

What did he say?

How to be a successful inventor

What do you need for an invention to be a success?

Well, good timing for a start. You can have a great idea which the public simply doesn’t want... yet. Take the Italian priest, Giovanni Caselli, who invented the first fax machine using an enormous pendulum in the 1860s. Despite the excellent quality of the reproductions, his invention quickly died a commercial death. It was not until the 1980s that the fax became an essential piece of equipment in every office... too late for Signor Caselli.

Money also helps. The Frenchman Denis Papin (1647 — 1712) had the idea for a steam engine almost a hundred years before the better- remembered Scotsman James Watt was even born... but he never had enough money to build one.

You also need to be patient (it took scientists nearly eighty years to develop a light bulb which actually worked)... but not too patient. In the 1870s, Elisha Gray, a professional inventor from Chicago, developed plans for a telephone. Gray saw it as no more than ‘a beautiful toy’, however. When he finally sent details of his invention to the Patent Office on February 14th 1876, it was too late; almost identical designs had arrived just two hours earlier... and the young man who sent them, Alexander Graham Bell, will always be remembered as the inventor of the telephone.

Sarah Curringham, Peter Moor, Cutting Edge, Longman.

Reading comprehension

I. Try to explain the meaning of the following words from the text:

Simply, quickly, actually, finally, nearly, however, despite.

II. Answer the following questions in pairs:

- Did Caselli’s “fax machine” actually work?

- Who designed the first steam engine?

- Who built the first steam engine?

- Who invented the first telephone?

III.Discussthe following questions in pairs:

1. Which information in the article did you already know?

2. Which information did you find more surprising?

 

IV. Discuss with your partner the following statement: “So, what do you need for an invention to be a success?” and make a conclusion to your groupmates.

 

On/offline activity

Divide into groups of 3 or 4 people and find the information from the Internet about different inventions (for ex., e-mail, ballpoint, personal computer, video recorder, dishwasher, etc.) and present the information on:

- the name of the inventor;

- the country this invention was made in;

- what the thing was made for;

- how it is used now;

- how it influenced our life.

Recommended resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail#Origin;

http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo30/history_ballpoint_pen.htm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05EEDC1530F93BA35752C0A9619C8B

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-11475-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=40652&messageID=751218

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/yourmoney/mobile.php

http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax

 

 

Online activity

Writing an e-mail (to a friend)

Work in pairs

There are no fixed rules about composing e-mails, especially to friends. But a friend will be surprised if you write in a formal style. An e-mail is rather like a conversation without the pauses and hesitations.

Read this e-mail from your friend Alex:

Hello! How are you? It’s a long time since I last heard from you. What is your news? How are your family? Are you still studying English? How are you getting on with it? How was your holiday? Where did you go and what did you do? Best wishes, Alex.

Leo Jones, Making progress, Cambridge University Press

Before you write a reply, decide what you will say to Alex.

Write your reply to Alex.

Show your reply to a partner, and read his or her reply.

Homework

Write an adventure story about the invention which plays an important part in your life now in the Past Simple Tense and using new words from the lesson:

simply, quickly, actually, finally, nearly, however, despite, really, however.

Reply to your friend about your day, study, life...

Lesson 5

Lexical exercises

Match the words and their suitable definitions given below:

Invention, to explode, dynamite, powerful, closet, iron, bulb, fortune, phonograph, discovery, genius, to carry out, research.

the lighting or heating device of a various kind and the device;

something that someone has made, designed or created, that did not exist before;

subsidiary room in an apartment house;

outstanding abilities, talent, talent in the certain field of activity;

the first device for mechanical record and reproduction of a sound;

to do a particular piece of work;

LISTENING

Listen to the text “Inventors and their inventions” and fill in the chart.

Inventor	Invention	Year of invention	Country
Samuel Colt
Rudolf Diesel
Samuel Morse
Charles Macintosh
Charles Rolls, Henry Royce
Gottlieb Daimler, Charles Benz

 

Lead-in

1. Do you use the Internet?
2. How often do you write e-mails?
3. Do you know who invented the e-mail and when?

READING

I. Read the text

The man who invented e-mail

Ray Tomilson is the man who invented e-mail. Back in 1971 he was working in a team of programmers who were working on a program called SNDMSG (‘send a message’) that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for one another – a sort of single-computer version of an e-mail system. They were working on the ARPANET, which was set up by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency to connect different research computers, and which later developed into the internet.

Ray wanted to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn’t occur naturally in people’s names and that wasn’t a digit. He chose @ symbol to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other distant hostrather than being local – and @ symbol is the only preposition on the keyboard. Before this, the purpose of the @ sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). At the time Ray says he gave it only ’30 to 40 seconds of thought’.

To test the program he sent a message to another computer. The message was something quite forgettable, and he has now forgotten what it was. Electronic mail is now known as e-mail or email. Domain names (apple.com, cambridge.org, etc.) were not used until 1984. Before that each host was only known by its IP (Internet protocol) address number.

Ray’s ideas changed the world and made a lot of others rich, but not him. ‘Innovations is sometimes rewarded’, he says modestly, ‘but not this innovation!’

Leo Jones, Making progress, Cambridge University Press

I. Find synonyms from the text to the following explanations:

to differentiate; the first part of a website’s address, which usually begins with ‘www.’ and ends with ‘com’, ‘.org’, ’uk’, or other letters that show which country the website is from.

II. True or False?

1. The symbol @ meant the only preposition on the keyboard before Ray started to use it.
2. It took Ray too much time to decide to use @.
3. He has forgotten his first message.
4. Ray’s idea made him very rich.

II. Read the article

Louis von Ahn

E-mail users hate “spam”, and the people who send spam hate Louis fon Ahn. They use programs called spambots to steel e-mail addresses. To stop them, von Ahn developed a visual test involves recognising distorted words, letters and numbers. Humans can pass the CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and Human Apart ”, but spambots cannot. Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are decoded by people every day. Then von Ahn started thinking about using the method to digitize books. Pages are scanned into computers that convert images into text. But computers cannot recognize distorted letters. That’s where humans can help, says von Ahn. The solution is to send unclear texts in the form of CAPATCHAs for people to decode. Born in Guatemala City, 30-year-old von Ahn teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pensylvania.

Business Spotlight, 2/08

Try to give the explanation of the following words from the text: