Английский язык. Методические указания и контрольные задания №1. Очирова М.И. - 25 стр.

                                                                       Capek (1890-1938). Capek's play was called R.U.R. which
VI. a) Прочтите текст и ответьте на вопрос:                            stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was about me-
What are the reasons of the ever growing use of computers              chanical automatons that did the work of men, and were ef-
and demand in them in the world today?                                 ficient but soulless. In the play, society exploited them,
                                                                       сame to depend utterly on them, and was destroyed by them
                                                                       when they revolted. Since then, the term robot has come to
                                                                       mean a mechanical man, often in recognizable human form,
               COMPUTERS CONCERN YOU.                                  as well as a non-human-looking machine that does work
                                                                       formerly only handled by men.
1. When Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cam-         5. Since the early days of Capek’s play robot must have found
   bridge University, invented the first calculating machine in        its way into the dictionaries of every modem language but in
   1812 he could hardly have imagined the situation we find            its own original language there is no sense of a mechanical
   ourselves in today.                                                 man, just of an ordinary-worker.
2. Nearly everything we do in the modern world Is helped, or
   even controlled, by computers, the complicated descendants       б) Прочитайте текст еще раз. Проверьте cебя, как вы
   of hie simple machine. Computers are being used more and         поняли текст, выбрав правильный ответ, соответст-
   more extensively in the world today, for the simple reason       вующий его содержанию:
   that they are far more efficient than human beings. They
   have much better memories and can store huge amounts of          1. The ascendant of modem computers is ...
   information, and they can do calculations in a fraction of the         a) a robot
   time taken by а human mathematician. No man alive can do               b) the first calculating machine
   500.000 sums in one second, but an advanced computer can.              c) a mechanical monster
   In fact, computers can do many of the things we do, but
   faster and better. They can pay wages, reserve seats on          2. «Robot» is one of the few words borrowed from ...
   planes, control machines m factories, work out tomorrow's              a) English
   weather, and even play chess, write poetry, or compose mu-             b) Czech
   sic.                                                                  c) Russian
3. Robot геаllу means a workman, not a mechanical monster. It
   is one of the very few Slav words (m this case Czech) bor-       3. It was not until... that the word «robot» began to be widely
   rowed in the English language. It comes from the old Slav        used in modem languages.
   word robu, which means a servant. In modern Slav, the word            a) 1812
   robotnik means workman and is linked to the Russian word              b) 1938
   for work, robota.                                                     c) 1923
4. Robot came into general use in English only after 1923. fol-          d) 1890
   lowing the great succеss of a play by a Czech author Karl