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II. Study the words. Make sure you know them.
tendency, stability, airplane, condition, machine,
calculation.
III. Read the text and say why Wright Brothers can be
thought of as audacious men.
Orville and Wilbur Wright were inspired by Otto Lilienthal, a
German glider pioneer. Though he crashed to his death in 1896,
the Wrights were obsessed by the technical problems involved
in flight. They approached the issue methodically, working out
ways to control a glider's tendency to pitch up and down, roll
side to side, or yaw left and right. By the third glider they built,
they had solved most of these problems of steering and stability.
To make a self-powered airplane, they needed to develop a
very light gasoline engine and an appropriate propeller. By
December 1903, their first airplane (Flyer /, later renamed Kitty
Hawk) was ready to test. It had a 12.3 meter wingspan; was 6.4
meters long, and weighed about 274 kilos without the pilot. It
was powered by the Wrights' home-made 12 horsepower
gasoline engine. The Wrights returned to the site at Kill Devil
Hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where they had tested
their gliders. Their selection of this spot was based on national
weather records which showed it to have consistently favorable
conditions.
The first day's attempt was unsuccessful, but in a few days,
Orville flew the plane 37 meters, which took 12 seconds. They
made several more flights that day, the longest being 260 meters
in 59 seconds. The Wrights press release sent out the following
month was largely ignored. Many people just didn't believe it,
though there were five witnesses to their first flights.
Orville later wrote of that first motorized flight:
"With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of
flights in the last ten years, I would hardly think today of
making my first flight on a strange machine in a 27 mile wind,
even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was
safe. After these years of experience I look with amazement
upon our audacity in attempting flights with a new and untried
machine under such circumstances. Yet faith in our calculations
and the design of the first machine, based upon our tables of air
pressures, secured by months of careful laboratory work, and
confidence in our system of control developed by three years of
actual experiences in balancing gliders in the air had convinced
us that the machine was capable of lifting and maintaining itself
in the air, and that, with a little practice, it could be safely
flown.
IV.Comprehension Check.
1. Match the words with their meaning by placing the proper
letter on each blank.
- inspiration a) to preoccupy the mind with an
idea or emotion
- to obsess b) to cause to believe
without doubt
- to convince c) an idea or impulse which
loads to creative action.
- circumstance d) a belief in the value or truth.
- faith e) a condition.
2. Cross out the word which does not correspond to other
words in the line.
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