Text C. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

Pre-text Exercises

1. Read the names of the schools. Give Ukrainian equivalents:

– School of Architecture and Planning;

– School of Engineering;

– School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences;

– Alfred P. Sloan School of Management;

– School of Science.

2. Read the names of the departments. Give Ukrainian equivalents:

Architecture; Media Arts and Sciences; Urban Studies and Planning; Aeronautics and Astronautics; Biological Engineering Division; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Engineering Systems Division; Materials Science and Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Nuclear Engineering; Ocean Engineering; Anthropology; Comparative Media Studies; Economics; Foreign Languages and Literatures; History; Humanities; Linguistics and Philosophy; Literature; Music and Theatre Arts; Political Science; Science, Technology, and Society; Writing and Humanistic Studies; Biology Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Chemistry, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences; Mathematics; Physics.

3. Look through the email and answer the following questions:

1. What institute is the letter about?

2. Is the history of the institute described?

3. Are the schools and departments mentioned?

4. Are undergraduate academics described?

5. Is the campus described?

6. Are the most famous alumni named?

4. Read the email. To understand it better consult active vocabulary:

Date: Sun., 2 Oct. 2012 20:44:35

From: Mike Nilson <[e-mail]>

To: Maksym Marchenko<[e-mail]>

Subject: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dear Maksym,

 

Thank you for the letter. It was really interesting to read about your University. I had a rather tight day L. But before going to bed I decided to write about my Alma-Mater. MIT has also a Museum. I visited it last year and got some information. I think you will enjoy reading it. Today I shall write about Institute’s history, campus, undergraduate academics, and alumni.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranks among the best universities in the world. It is a leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. MIT is a private non-for- profit institution with mostly four-year programs and enrollment of 4,112 undergraduate, and 6,228 graduate students. It’s motto is “ Mens et Manus ("mind and hand")” MIT is organized into five schools which contain 27 academic departments:

• School of Architecture and Planning: Architecture, Media Arts and Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning;

• School of Engineering: Aeronautics and Astronautics, Biological Engineering Division, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Engineering Systems Division, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Ocean Engineering;

• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Anthropology, Comparative Media Studies, Economics, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Humanities, Linguistics and Philosophy, Literature, Music and Theatre Arts, Political Science, Science, Technology, and Society, Writing and Humanistic Studies;

• Alfred P. Sloan School of Management;

• School of Science: Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Mathematics, Physics.

Among its most famous departments and schools are the Lincoln Laboratory, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Media Lab and the Sloan School of Management.

History

MIT has a long and glorious history. It was founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers, a distinguished natural scientist, who wished to create a new kind of independent educational institution relevant to an increasingly industrialized America. The Institute's opening was delayed by the Civil War, and it admitted its first students in 1865. In the following years, it established a sterling reputation in the sciences and in engineering, but it also fell on hard financial times. These two factors made it a perfect fit in many peoples' eyes to merge with nearby Harvard University, which was flush with cash but much weaker in the sciences than it was in the liberal arts. Around 1900, a merger was proposed with Harvard University, but was cancelled after protests from MIT's alumni. The two schools still maintain a friendly rivalry today. In 1916, MIT moved across the Charles River to its present location in Cambridge. MIT's prominence increased as a result of World War II and the United States government's investment in science and technology in response to Sputnik. MIT's contributions to the twentieth century advancement of science and technology include project Whirlwind, the pioneering computer built under the direction of Jay W. Forrester between 1947 and 1952, and notable for its technological achievement (including the invention of magnetic core memory), as well as for its cultural contribution to the development of personal computing.

MIT has been at least nominally coeducational since admitting Ellen Swallow Richards in 1870, if not earlier. For some years past, it has admitted slightly more women students than men. A strong female presence did not appear until 1963 when a women’s dormitory was built.

In 2001 president Charles Vest made history by being the first university official in the world to admit that his institution had severely restricted the career of women faculty members and researchers through sexist discrimination, and to make steps to redress the issue. In August 2004 Susan Hockfield, a molecular neurobiologist, was appointed as MIT's first female president. She took office as the Institute's 16th president on December 6, 2004.

 

Campus

MIT's 168-acre (68.0 ha) campus spans approximately a mile of the north side of the Charles River basin in the city of Cambridge. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. MIT buildings all have a number and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to only by number while residence halls are referred to by name. A network of underground tunnels connects many of the buildings, providing protection from the Cambridge weather. Students agree that this maze is a welcome feature, enabling them to get from class to class without getting cold or wet. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge. It is the longest bridge crossing the Charles River. The bridge is marked off in the fanciful unit called the Smoot: 364.4 Smoots and One Ear. The neighborhood of MIT is a mixture of high tech companies seeded by MIT alumni combined with working class neighborhoods of Cambridge.

Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 12 undergrad dormitories, although 8% of students live off campus or commute. On-campus housing provides live-in graduate student tutors and faculty housemasters who have the dual role of both helping students and monitoring them for medical or mental health problems. New undergrad students specify their dorm and floor preferences a few days after arrival on campus, and as a result diverse communities arise in living groups. MIT also has 5 dormitories for single graduate students and 2 apartment buildings on campus for married student families.

MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the largest university-based nuclear reactors in the United States. The prominence of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has been controversial, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured. Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel and a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering 9,400,000 square feet (870,000 m²) of campus.

Undergraduate Academics

MIT utilizes a 4-1-4-based academic calendar. Its tuition and fees are $40,732 (2011-12). Admission to MIT is extremely competitive. There is a large amount of pressure in the classes, which have been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose" or "academic boot camp." Although the perceived pressure is high, the failure rate both from classes and the Institute as a whole, is low. There is a refreshing lack of so-called "weed out" classes. The anti-authoritarian nature of the school – combined with its emphasis on technical excellence and information sharing – results in a situation where faculty, upperclassmen, and fellow students are remarkably helpful even to newly-arrived freshmen. This culture of helpfulness offsets the academic stress to a certain degree. Furthermore, students are not assigned letter grades in their first semester; instead, they are graded Pass/No Record. To allow the students to gradually adjust to regular grading, second semester is ABC/No Record. For both semesters, classes that a student fails are noted on the internal transcript but erased from all external records.

Majors are numbered, and students will typically refer to their major by the course number rather than the name. For example, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is Course 6, while Physics is Course 8. Classes within each course also have numeric identifications, which most students use more frequently than the written names. All students are required to take basic physics (8.01 and 8.02), a semester of biology, a term of chemistry, as well as calculus (18.01 and 18.02).

Most of the science and engineering classes follow a standard pattern. Typically, a professor gives a lecture that explains a concept. Then, teaching assistants lead recitations to explore fuller details, or often to provide students help on homework problems. Problem sets, given roughly weekly, are designed to enable the student to master the concept. Students often gather in informal groups to solve the problem sets, and it is within these groups that much of the actual learning takes place. Over time, students compile "bibles," collections of problem set and examination questions and answers. They may be created over several years and are often handed down "from generation to generation" – bearing in mind that "generations" of student time may be short-lived.

In many classes, the problem sets make up a relatively small fraction of the grade. The rest of the evaluation consists of performance on tests, which typically contain grueling problems that measure the students' ability to apply their knowledge, often to something not specifically covered in class. Problem sets and tests, even for the large introductory freshmen classes, are usually free response, hand graded, with much partial credit given to people who almost get the answer right. This is highly labor intensive, and after a test for a large class one can see a room full of teaching assistants and professors hand-grading the examinations.

The lack of machine grading and multiple-choice stems from the belief that understanding the concept is almost as important as getting the right answer. For example, students are seldom strongly penalized for making arithmetic mistakes. Test problems are intentionally extremely difficult and often clever, and are designed so that few students can obtain a perfect score. However, the awarding of partial credit can mitigate the difficulty, and moreover, many professors "curve" the scores to reflect how the class as a whole fared on the test. Most classes end with a grade distribution centered around B or C.

Alumni

Finishing my letter I can’t help mentioning the most prominent names of Institute’s alumni. Many of MIT's over 120,000 alumni have had considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and business. Among them Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, MA-1 Representative John Olver, CA-13 Representative Pete Stark, former British Foreign Minister David Miliband, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, physicist Richard Feynman, and former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi. Prominent institutions of higher education have been led by MIT alumni. More than one third of the United States' manned spaceflights have included MIT-educated astronauts (among them Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin). MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as Intel, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Qualcomm, Bose, Raytheon, Koch Industries, Rockwell International, Genentech, Dropbox, and Campbell Soup. According to the British newspaper “ The Guardian”, MIT alumni have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms between them generate global revenues of about $1.9tn (£1.2tn) a year. If MIT was a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP of any nation in the world. MIT managed $718.2 million in research expenditures and an $8.0 billion endowment in 2009. As of 2011, twenty-four MIT alumni won the Nobel Prize, forty-four were selected as Rhodes Scholars, and fifty-five were selected as Marshall Scholars.

Best wishes,

Mike

 

Active Vocabulary

1. Learn the following words and word-combinations to comprehend the letter:

tight	напружений
alumnus	вихованець (університету)
to rank	стояти вище за інших
non- for- profit	некомерційний
enrolment	внесення до списків
motto	гасло
artificial	штучний
distinguished	видатний, відомий
to increase	зростати, збільшувати(ся)
to delay	відкладати, відстрочувати
to admit	допускати, приймати
sterling	бездоганний
to fall on …	випадати на чию-небудь долю
to merge	поглинати, з’єднуватися
to be flush with …	багатий на …
liberal arts	гуманітарні науки
to cancel	скасовувати, викреслювати
rivalry	суперництво
prominence	популярність
in response to …	у відповідь на …
under the direction of …	під керівництвом …
notable for …	визначний, видатний
contribution	сприяння, внесок
coeducation	спільне навчання
dormitory	гуртожиток
to make steps to …	зробити кроки …
to redress	виправити
to appoint	призначати
to span	вимірювати п’ядями
to refer	посилатися
maze	лабіринт, плутанина
to get cold (wet)	замерзнути, промокнути
smoot	нестандартна міра довжини (1,70 м)
tutor	молодший викладач ВНЗ
controversial	спірний, дискусійний
pressurе	тиск, вплив
tuition fee	плата за навчання
grueling	виснажливий
competitive	суперницький
to perceive	розуміти, усвідомлювати
failure rate	“відсів”
to weed out	відбирати, видаляти
to offset	компенсувати
grade	оцінка
to adjust	пристосовувати(ся)
major	основний предмет
to number	нумерувати
to lead recitation	опитувати
set	набір, комплект
to compile	складати
faction	частка
to apply	застосовувати
lack	відсутність
to mitigate	зменшувати, полегшувати
revenue	дохід
expenditure	витрати
endowment	постійний дохід
to stem	походити
to fare on …	бути, поживати, вестися

2. Are these statements true or false? If they are false, say why. Use the following phrases:

I can’t agree to this statement because…

Just the contrary…

I think…

To my mind…

1. Mike had a very tight day, so he would only write about MIT’s alumni.

2. MIT deals with IT only.

3. It’s motto is “ Mens et Manus ("mind and hand")”

4. The Institute consists of 27 schools.

5. MIT was founded in 1865.

6. It merged with nearby Harvard University in 1900.

7. MIT’s present location is in Cambridge.

8. The first woman student was admitted in 1970.

9. Charles Vest took office as the Institute's 16th president on December 6, 2004.

10. MIT's campus is168-acre (68.0 ha).

11. MIT buildings have both a number and a name.

12. When getting from class to class students usually get cold or wet.

13. Students can live off or in dormitory.

14. Campus includes some notable facilities.

15. Education at MIT is free of charge.

16. The anti-authoritarian nature of the school results in a situation where faculty, upperclassmen, and fellow students are remarkably helpful even to newly arrived freshmen.

17. Students will typically refer to their major by the course number rather than the name.

18. Most of the science and engineering classes do not follow a standard pattern.

19. Over 120,000 people graduated from MIT.

20. MIT alumni have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people.

3. Study the letter and answer the following questions:

1. Where does Mike study?

2. What kind of institution is it?

3. How long do most programs last?

4. How many students study there?

5. How is MIT organized?

History

6. When was MIT founded?

7. Who founded the Institute?

8. Where is MIT located now?

9. When did MIT’s prominence increase?

10. What are MIT’s greatest contributions to the 20^th century?

11. When did a strong female presence appear at MIT?

12. What is Charles Vest famous for?

Campus

13. What is MIT’s campus area?

14. How is campus divided?

15. Which buildings are referred to by number and by name?

16. How do students get from class to class?

17. How many dormitories are there?

18. What is the role of tutors and housemasters in the dormitories?

19. Are there any notable campus facilities? What are they?

Undergraduate academics

20. What kind of academic year does MIT include?

21. What are its tuition and fees?

22. How have the classes been characterized?

23. What does the anti-authoritarian nature of the school result?

24. How are students graded in the first semester?

25. How are students graded in the second semester?

26. Are majors numbered or named?

27. What is the standard pattern of classes?

28. What are “bibles”?

29. What does evaluation consist of?

30. How do most classes end?

Alumni

31. How many people consider MIT their Alma Mater?

32. Which prominent names are familiar to you?

33. What did “The Guardian” find out?