Английский для бакалавров. Зарубина Л.П - 197 стр.

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197
The research was carried out under great difficulty. Mme. Curie had to use an
old store-room at the University as her laboratory - she was refused a better room. It
was cold, there was no proper apparatus and very little space for research work. Soon
she discovered that the rays of uranium were like no other known rays.
Marie Curie wanted to find out if other chemical substances might emit similar
rays. So she began to examine every known chemical substance. Once after repeating
her experiments time after time she found that a mineral called pitchblende emitted
much more powerful rays than any she had already found.
Now, an element is a chemical substance which so far as is known cannot be
split up into other substances. As Mme. Curie had examined every known chemical
element and none of them had emitted such powerful rays as pitchblende she could
only decide that this mineral must contain some new element.
Scientists had declared that every element was already known to them. But all
Mme Curie’s experiments pointed out that it was not so. Pitchblende must contain
some new and unknown element. There was no other explanation for the powerful
rays which it emitted. At that moment Pierre Curie stopped his own investigations on
the physics of crystals and joined his wife in her effort to find those more active un-
known chemical elements.
Scientists call the property of giving out such rays “radioactivity”, and Mme.
Curie decided to call the new element “radium”, because it was more strongly radio-
active than any known metal.
In 1903 Marie and Pierre together with Henry Becquerel were awarded the No-
bel Prize in Physics.
In 1911 Marie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But the second prize went
to her alone for in 1906 Pierre had died tragically in a traffic accident.
Mme. Sklodowska-Curie, the leading woman-scientist, the greatest woman of
her generation, has become the first person to receive a Nobel Prize twice.
Marie lived to see her story repeated. Her daughter Irene grew into a woman
with the same interests as her mother’s and she was deeply interested in her mother's
work. From Marie she learned all about radiology and chose science for her career.
At twenty-nine she married Frederic Joliot, a brilliant scientist at the Institute of Ra-
dium, which her parents had founded.
Together the Joliot-Curies carried on the research work that Irene's mother had
begun. In 1935 Irene and her husband won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of arti-
ficial radioactivity.
So, Marie lived to see the completion of the great work, but she died on the eve
of the award.
Ronald Mackin
(from “A Course of English Study”)
I. Read the text ‘Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium’. Choose a suitable
headline for each paragraph of the text from the list below.
1. Experiments with uranium.

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