Английский для бакалавров. Зарубина Л.П - 198 стр.

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198
2. Marie lived to see the completion of her work on radioactivity.
3. The discovery of a new element.
4. Marie’s youth.
5. Student’s life in Paris.
6. Pierre Curie.
7. A very happy marriage.
8. Experiments with pitchblende.
II. Find in the text the verbs which can be used to describe the main events in
Marie’s life. Describe Marie Curie’s life.
III. Find the passages describing Pierre Curie’s scientific career and Bec-
querel’s experiments. Translate them into Russian.
Text 2. IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE PREDICTIONS?
The problem of standing at the beginning of a milleninium and seeking to make
predictions about new developments in the technology with which systems engineers
will need to contend in the coming millennia is an exercise in utter foolishness; it
may be possible to make somewhat reasonable projections for ten or, with luck,
twenty-five years ... but certainly not a thousand.The premium in this latter case is on
adaptability. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that sur-
vives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change."
The underlying truth of this observation can be seen simply by turning the hands
of the clock back a thousand years and asking if a well-educated individual at the turn
of the last millennium would have been likely to have had any inkling of the advent
of the printing press or the electronic digital computer. The notion that humans could
fly would then have still been nine centuries away, and traveling to the moon, while
exciting, would turn out to be left to the last sliver of the millennia ... as would most
of the other scientific and technological achievements profoundly affecting our lives
today. A brave forecast would probably have been far more concerned with the
mounting problems of pollution of roads from horses and donkeys, and of diseases
such as smallpox than it would have been with concern over trash mail on the Internet
and computer viruses disrupting the global banking system.
It does seem evident that many of the issues seriously affecting humankind as
we enter a new millennium are, at their root, systems engineering problems - often
having a remarkably high technology content but seldom having simple answers. A
listing of such challenges might include the provision of food throughout society, the
maintenance of a strong global economy, the elimination of crime, the modernization
of the transportation system, and the provision of energy, health care, security, and
education. Global leadership in the twenty-first century could well become the prov-
ince of systems engineers . . . if indeed they choose to accept the challenge.
( IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Magazine, Jubilee Issue, October 2000 )

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