Past Simple утвердит предлож. V2 = Past form вопросит предлож

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Extracted from “Dyslexia”

by Frank R. Vellutino

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It was through the works of the U.S. neuropsychiatrist Samuel Torrey Orton in 1925 that the deficiency first came to be perceived as lying in the visual system. Orton suggested that an apparent dysfunction in visual perception and visual memory, characterized by a tendency to perceive letters and words in reverse (b for d or was for saw), caused dyslexia. Such a disorder would also explain mirror writing.

Working at the Child Research and Study Center of the State University of New York at Albany, my colleagues and I have begun to examine, and to challenge, common beliefs about dyslexia, including the notion that the condition stems primarily from visual deficits. Along with other researchers in this country and abroad, we have been finding that dyslexia is a subtle language deficiency. * The deficiency has its roots in other areas: phonological-coding deficits (inability to represent and access the sound of a word in order to help remember the word); deficient phonemic segmentation (inability to break words into component sounds); poor vocabulary development, and trouble discriminating grammatical and syntactic differences among words and sentences. Far from being a visual problem dyslexia appears to be the consequence of limited facility in using language to code other types of information.

Text 9

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by Peter H. Gleick

In many nations, big dams and reservoirs were originally considered vital for national security, economic prosperity and agricultural survival. Until the late 1970s and early 1980s, few people took into account the environmental consequences of these massive projects. Today, however, the results are clear: dams have destroyed the ecosystems in and around countless rivers, lakes and streams.

As environmental awareness has heightened globally, the desire to protect – and even restore – some of these natural resources has grown.

* Until very recently, international financial organizations such as the World Bank, export-import banks and multilateral aid agencies subsidized or paid in full for dams or other water-related civil engineering projects – which often have price tags in the tens of billions of dollars. These organizations are slowly beginning to reduce or eliminate such subsidies, putting more of the financial burden on already strained national economies. Having seen so much ineffective development in the past – and having borne the associated costs (both monetary and otherwise) of that development – many governments are unwilling to pay for new structures to solve water shortages and other problems.

A handful of countries are even taking steps to remove some of the most egregious and damaging dams. For example, in 1998 and 1999 two dams in the Loire River basin in France were demolished to help restore fisheries in the region.

Fortunately – and unexpectedly – the demand for water is not rising as rapidly as some predicted. As a result, the pressure to build new water infrastructures has diminished over the past two decades. Although population, industrial output and economic productivity have continued to soar in developed nations, the rate at which people withdraw water from aquifers, rivers and lakes has slowed. And in a few parts of the world, demand has actually fallen. *

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Extracted from “Making Every Drop Count”

by Peter H. Gleick
The idea that a planet with a surface covered mostly by water could be facing a water shortage seems incredible. Yet 97 percent of the world’s water is too salty for human consumption or crops, and much of the rest is out of reach in deep groundwater or in glaciers and ice caps. Not surprisingly, researchers have investigated techniques for dipping into the immense supply of water in the oceans. The technology to desalinate brackish water or saltwater is well developed, but it remains expensive and is currently an option only in wealthy but dry areas near the coast. Some regions, such as the Arabian Gulf, are highly dependent on desalination, but the process remains a minor contributor to overall water supplies, providing less than 0.2 percent of global withdrawals.

* With the process of converting saltwater to freshwater so expensive, some companies have turned to another possibility: moving clean water in ships or even giant plastic bags from regions with an abundance of the resource to those places around the globe suffering from a lack of water. But this approach, too, may have serious economic and political constraints.

Rather than seeking new distant sources of water, smart planners are beginning to explore using alternative kinds of water to meet certain needs. Why should communities raise all water to drinkable standards and then use that expensive resource for watering lawns? Most water ends up flowing down the drain after a single use, and developed countries spend billions of dollars to collect and treat this wastewater before dumping it into a river or the ocean. Meanwhile, in poorer countries, this water is often simply returned untreated to a river or lake where it may pose a threat to human health or the environment. Recently attention has begun to focus on reclaiming and reusing this water.

New approaches to meet water needs will not be easy to implement: economic and institutional structures still encourage the wasting of water and the destruction of ecosystems. Among the barriers to better water planning and use are inappropriately low water prices, inadequate information on new efficiency technologies, inequitable water allocations, and government subsidies for growing water-intensive crops in arid regions or building dams. *

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by Wendee Holtcamp

Tasmanian devil, or “Taz”, resemble a small dog with white splotches. These marsupial carnivores (сумчатые хищники) once lived in mainland Australia but today remain only on its island state of Tasmania.

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During the past 10 years, a contagious and fatal cancer has decimated the world’s Tasmanian devils. Pustulant tumors deform their faces, forcing teeth from their jaws. The devils eventually starve, but not before passing on the virulent cancer. Concerned that the disease could wipe out the devils, conservationists have already started planning how they might reintroduce the species if it goes extinct.

Around 1996, devils with the tumors started appearing in northeast Tasmania. Devil facial disease (DFTD), as it is formally called spread rapidly and now covers at least 56 percent of Tasmania.

* Scientists initially suspected a virus but were unable to isolate one. Then Anne-Maree Pearse of the Tasmanian DPIW (Department of Primary Industries and Water) made a serendipitous discovery: devil DNA has 14 paired chromosomes, but devil tumor cells had only 13 – and all had identical chromosomal rearrangements. Cancer tumors typically show genetic corruption, but having identical rearrangements would be nearly impossible. The Best explanation: a rogue cell line emerged in a single devil that has taken on an infectious, cancerous existence.

With the population plummeting and scientific answers potentially years away, conservation biologists are preparing for the worst. In 2006 Australian officials designated the once abundant species “vulnerable to extinction” and shipped 47 diseased-free devils to mainland wildlife park in “Project Ark” – a last-ditch effort to preserve the genetic diversity of devils across Tasmania for captive breeding.

Research is suggesting other DFTD-beating strategies as well. DPIW acknowledges that, despite imperfect information, biologists must move rapidly. The demise of the devil could cause cascading effect in Tasmania’s ecosystem – especially since someone recently introduced red foxes to the area, a carnivore that has driven several local species to extinction. Devils can competitively keep fox population down, because they fill a similar niche.

At this point, there is no single miraculous solution for saving the Tasmanian devil. Biologists still cannot even detect DFTD before tumors appear. But with millions of dollars being pumped into research, “Taz” may just be able to whirl and fight his way into the future. *

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by JR Minkel

Call it the easy-bake nanosensor. Researchers report they have built an exquisitely sensitive biological detector from silicon using conventional tools, meaning it could in principle be massproduced.

* Relying on standard material and manufacturing techniques would make it much easier to incorporate a nanosensor with the electronics inside a handheld device, says chemist Mark Reed of Yale University, co-author of a report in this week’s Nature detailing the technology. “This has the ability to scale in power and cost, just like regular electronics,”: he says.

Reed and his colleagues coated their 30-nanometer-wide wires in antibodies or other biological molecules capable of latching onto certain proteins. These receptors plucked their matching proteins from a solution washed over the sensor, which detected the change because the electric charges on the amassed proteins easily disrupted the current flowing through the wires. Reed likens the effect to the way that stepping on a flimsy garden hose (but not a tough fire hose) would block its flow.

The device detected as few as 30,000 free-floating proteins in a cubic millimeter of fluid in a matter of seconds, which Reed says compares favourably with other nanowire sensors. It also recognized immune cells by the acid they emit when they bind to antibodies, the group reports. Co-author and Yale bioengineer Tarek Fahmy adds, “There’s no other way to do this rapidly with high throughput. This is what we’re really excited about.”

The researchers carved their device from a high quality wafer of insulation material topped with a thin layer of silicon. They used standard techniques to build a stencil (shaped like the device they wanted), which they placed on the wafer. They then poured a solvent on top that etched away the exposed silicon. *

Normally such a process would leave relatively thick wires, so to reduce the wires to nanosize they removed the stencil and let the etching continue. Reed says the combination of a good wafer and a slow-acting solvent gave them smoother, more precise nanowires than other groups have achieved by etching.

How long for a version you can hold in your hand? Reed will not speculate, but he says, “this is something I will see in my lifetime.”


Text 13

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by K. Eric Drexler

In 1959 physicist Richard Freyman gave an after-dinner talk exploring the limits of miniaturization. He set out from known technology, surveyed the limits set by physical law and ended by arguing the possibility – even inevitability – of “atom by atom” construction.

What at the time seemed absurdly ambitious, even bizarre, has recently become a widely shared goal. Decades of technological progress have shrunk microelectronics to the threshold of the molecular scale, while scientific progress at the molecular level - especially on the molecular machinery of living systems – has now made clear to many what was envisioned by a sole genius so long ago.

Inspired by molecular biology, studies of advanced nanotechnologies have focused on bottom-up construction, in which molecular machines assemble molecular building blocks to form products, including new molecular machines.

At the moment, work focuses on the earliest stages: finding out how to build larger structures with atomic precision, learning to design molecular machines and identifying intermediate goals with high payoff.

* To understand the potential of molecular manufacturing technology, it helps to look at the macroscale machine systems used now in industry. Picture a robotic arm that reaches over to a conveyor belt, picks up a loaded tool, applies the tool to a workpiece under construction, replaces the empty tool on the belt, picks up the next loaded tool, and so on – as in today’s automated factories.

Now mentally shrink this entire mechanism, including the conveyor belt, to the molecular level to form an image of a nanoscale construction system. Given a sufficient variety of tools, this system would be a general-purpose building device, nicknamed an assembler. In principle, it could build almost anything, including copies of itself.

Molecular nanotechnology as a field does not depend on the feasibility of this particular proposal – a collection of less general building devices could carry out the functions mentioned above. But because the assembler concept is still controversial, it’s worth mentioning the objections being raised.

One prominent chemist speaking at a recent event sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science asked how one could power and direct an assembler and whether it could really break and re-form strong molecular bonds. These are reasonable questions that can be answered only by describing designs and calculations too bulky to fit in this essay. Fortunately, technical literature providing seemingly adequate answers has been available since at least 1992, when my book Nanosystems was published. *

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ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОЕ АГЕНСТВО ПО ОБРАЗОВАНИЮ

МОСКОВСКИЙ ИНЖЕНЕРНО-ФИЗИЧЕСКИЙ ИНСТИТУТ

(ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ)

И.И.Кондратьева Н.А.Некрасова
GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY REVISION

FOR THE EXAM

Методические пособие

для подготовки студентов III и IV семестров

к государственному экзамену по английскому языку

Москва 2008

И.И. Кондратьева, Н.А. Некрасова

М.: МИФИ, 2008.
Данное пособие соответствует программе курса «Иностранный язык для студентов технических вузов».

Оно содержит краткое, данное в схемах и таблицах изложение грамматических правил и большое количество упражнений; в нем также приводится объяснение основных лексических трудностей, с которыми студенты сталкиваются при переводе научно-технических статей. В пособии имеется материал по обучению пересказу текста, в него также включены рекомендации по организации и проведению студенческой учебной конференции.

Предлагаемое пособие предназначено для студентов 3 и 4 курсов технических специальностей МИФИ и будет эффективно на всех этапах подготовки к экзамену. Его можно использовать в качестве проверочного и зачетного материала, как справочную литературу (особенно при самостоятельной работе студентов над переводами научно-технических текстов), а также как сборник упражнений при работе в классе.

ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ

Данное методическое пособие разработано в соответствии с действующей программой по английскому языку для студентов III и IV семестров.

Основная цель пособия – предоставить студентам дополнительный материал при подготовке к государственному экзамену. Оно содержит не только объяснение и закрепление необходимого грамматического и лексического материала, но также тесты и задания на перевод, аналогичные заданиям в экзаменационных билетах. В нем даются рекомендации по реферированию (пересказу) текстов и проведению студенческой конференции. Здесь также разбирается довольно редко встречающаяся в подобных пособиях тема “Ложные друзья переводчика“.

Авторы выражают благодарность Клементьевой Ольге Володаровне и проф. Шрире Виктору Исаевичу за помощь в редактировании данного пособия

1. 
   “Scientific American”, номера журнала, 2007.
   
2. 
   Циммерман М., Веденеева К. Русско-английский научно-технический словарь переводчика, - «Наука», 1991.
   
3. 
   Англо-русский физический словарь под редакцией Толстого Д.М.,- М. «Русский Язык», 1978.
   
4. 
   Борисова Л.И. Ложные друзья переводчика. Общенаучная лексика, - М. «НВИ-Тезаурус», 2002