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Рецензенты старший преподаватель кафедры английской филологии факультета ргф ивГУ, к ф. н
EXERCISES
Find in the text equivalents to:
компьютерная грамотность; доступность (наличие); осведом ленность; век информации; прожить оставшуюся жизнь; притяга тельность компьютеров; снять с банковского счета; технический жаргон; взаимодействие; рекламный ролик; к удивлению; пара занятий; растеряться; предыдущий учебный опыт; поделиться со сверстниками; быть наедине с; помнить; страшноватый; однокурс ники; вырасти в компьютерной среде; учиться друг у друга; пмьзо- ватель-новичок.
Answer the following questions:
What does being computer literate mean?
WTiat are the three aspects of the computer’s universal appeal?
What is the best way to understand computers?
What are the simplest applications of computers?
What is the hand-on component of computer literacy?
What are some novice computer users frustrated by?
' 7. What is the first computer literacy skill?
Is it possible for everyone to be computer literate? Do you need any I special talents?
HI. Put the proper words into sentences:
computer networks, info, computer literate, routine, boring, repetitive tasks, accuracy, to come to terms with, quantative.
Society is heading in the direction of... majority.
Computer programs now can integrate text, ... data and graphs.
The source of... is the computer.
It is difficult for some people to come ... the speed of change in the modem world.
Many ... which people find ... and tiring can now be carried out by machines.
Computers give us speed, ..., scope, quality, flexibility, large ca pacity, elimination of the ... and ..., increased efficiency.
We need ... with expanding computer technology and adjust our vision to a whole new world.
As more and more people are linked by ..., how soon will it be before the paperless office becomes a reality?
Construct other sentences in these patterns (models):
At best the computer can search for intelligence in the form of operating system.
Computers might affect your future career.
Young people may not understand these cyberphobic reactions.
Computers do not put in the data they must work with, people do.
Could unauthorized persons obtain personal info?
Should legislators be encouraged to create laws for society’s protec tion?
We cannot guarantee that anyone who drives a car is an auto me chanic.
Complete the sentences (if, when-dauses):
When your PC is turned off...
You will bring it to life when...
If everyone around you uses computers...
If you are taken aback how to use a computer...
As multimedia becomes more prevalent on the Web...
If you look on the entire Internet today...
If the program fails the test...
Don’t open until...
If you are selling weapons, cryptography, military info, pornogra phy...
If the program passes the test...
If you don’t view your Web site as a global presence...
If Java is the answer,...
They will lose status if...
Provided you have the necessary tools...
TEXT III. WHY I WONT BUY A COMPUTER
I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecolog ical health, political honesty, stability, good work.
What would a computer cost me? More money than I can afford and more than I wish to pay to people whom I do not admire. But the cost would not be just monetary. It is well understood that technological innovation always requires the discarding of “the old model”, what would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody.
To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovations in my work. They are as follows:
The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
It should work clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
It should use less energy.
If possible it should use some form of solar energy.
It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided he has the necessary tools.
It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
It should not disrupt or replace anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
EXERCISES
I. Answer the following questions:
What does the author think a computer would “cost” him?
Given the author’s standards for technological innovation, what other new tools do you think he might object to?
How has technology changed your everyday life?
What new “gadgets” do you particularly like?
Have you learned to use a computer? Why or why not?
Do you fear the power of computers?
List ten modem inventions:
Invention
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Replacement
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Advantage
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Disadvantage
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electricity
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telephone
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writing letters
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less time
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too slow
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silicon chip
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cellular
phone
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True or false?
Modem technology is out of control, and ruining the quality of life on Earth; we must limit technology and its influence on individual.
Modem inventions are labor-saving devices. Without them peo ple remain slaves to boring, repetitive work.
How will science and technology affect our lives in future?
Complete the following and discuss it:
Scientific and technological breakthroughs have brought great ben efits. You only have to look around your own home to see...
Many illnesses can now be treated or cured, for example,...
Other examples of changes are...
Have our lives always been improved, however? Have we become too passive? Are we too dependent on technology? How dangerous could it be?
Take, for example, television, computer games, the Internet...
New products have also made a major difference to our working
lives.
Nowadays,...
In the future there may be even more major breakthroughs in the fields of medicine, leisure, work...
We may no longer have to...
We will be able to...
Topics for Essays, Oral or Written Reports
To be or not to be computer literate?
Pluses and minuses of computers.
How will computers affect our lives in future?
Discoveries, inventions, new products, and their effects (good and
evil).
Essay Selection for Reading as a Stimulus for Writing
KEEP CLICKING!
Computers spoil your eyes, computers are bad for your nerves, com puters — this computers — that! Don’t believe it! Why don V people criti cize guns that kill much more people? “That’s life”, you’ll say. Yes, but how can you blame such a wonderful thing like a computer, when you can '1 even use it properly? All evils imputed to computers are the results of our inexperience.
How can you blame computers for spoiling your eyes if you play Doom clones for hours? How can a computer be bad for your nerves if you cry out, “Damn, stupid piece of... “ (you know what) every time it hangs be cause of your being not too smart to tell it what you want to be done.
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Come on, lighten up, computer is just a piece of hardware and software mixed. And if you don’t know or can V decide how to make this explosive cocktail, ask yourself just one question: "Who is more stupid of you two?” Of course, I’m not a computer maniac beating everyone blaming an innocent machine. But there’s one little thing people can't or don’t want to understand: computers are not able to realize ideas you don’t have and undertake the projects you haven't mentioned. They are just tools in your hands. And the results of using them are the results of your being patient to tell that old “Buddy Wiener” in a really simple binary way: “Come on boy, do it!” Computers are of metal and plastic but if you don't scare them by your aggression, they do what should be done.
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Unit III. The Development of Computers
Prereading Discussion
What are tools?
What was the first tool?
What helped ape-like creatures evolve into human beings?
What is technology?
What tools of communication do you know?
What machines classify and modify information?
What do you know about Babbage, Pascal, Leibniz, and Jacquard?
Reading Analysis
VOCABULARY LIST
Nouns: ancestor, abacus, cloth, descendant, loom, pattern, preci sion, virtue.
Verbs: to inherit, to preserve, to distort, to consist of, to trace back, to contribute to, to persist, to weave, to improve, to slide. Adjectives: outstanding, (un)reliable, (insufficient, decorative. Word combinations: along with, rather than, other than, manual dexterity, to come into widespread use.
TEXT I. PREHISTORY
Tools are any objects other than the parts of our own bodies that we use to help us do our work. Technology is nothing more than the use of tools. When you use a screwdriver, a hammer, or an axe, you are using technology just as much as when you use an auto mobile, a television set, or a computer.
We tend to think of technology as a human invention. But the re verse is closer to the truth. Stone tools found along with fossils show that our ape-like ancestors were already putting technology to use. Anthropologists speculate that using tools may have helped these creatures evolve into human beings; in a tool-using society, manual dexterity and intelligence count for more than brute strength. The clever rather than the strong inherited the earth.
Most of the tools we have invented have aided our bodies rather than our minds. These tools help us lift and move and cut and shape. Only quite recently, for the most part, have we developed tools to aid our minds as well.
The tools of communication, from pencil and paper to television, are designed to serve our minds. These devices transmit information or preserve it, but they do not modify it in any way (If the information is modified, this is considered a defect rather than a virtue, as when a defective radio distorts the music we’re trying to hear.)
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Our interest lies with machines that classify and modify informa tion rather than merely transmitting it or preserving it. The ma chines that do this are the computers and the calculators, the so- called mind tools. The widespread use of machines for informationprocessing is a modem development. But simple examples of infor mation-processing machines can be traced back to ancient times. The following are some of the more important forerunners of the computer.
The Abacus. The abacus is the counting frame that was the most widely used device for doing arithmetic in ancient times and whose use persisted into modern times in the Orient. Early versions of the abacus consisted of a board with grooves in which pebbles could slide. The Latin word for pebble is calculus, from which we get the words abacus and calculate.
Mechanical Calculators. In the seventeenth century, calculators more sophisticated than the abacus began to appear. Although a number of people contributed to their development, Blaise Pascal (French mathematician and philosopher) and Wilhelm von Leib niz (German mathematician, philosopher, and diplomat) usually are singled out as pioneers. The calculators Pascal and Leibniz built were unreliable, since the mechanical technology of the time was not capable of manufacturing the parts with sufficient precision. As manufacturing techniques improved, mechanical calculators even tually were perfected; they were used widely until they were re placed by electronic calculators in recent times.
The Jacquard Loom. Until modem times, most information-pro cessing machines were designed to do arithmetic. An outstanding exception, however, was Jacquard’s automated loom, a machine de signed not for hard figures but beautiful patterns. A Jacquard loom weaves cloth containing a decorative pattern; the woven pattern is controlled by punched cards. Changing the punched cards changes the pattern the loom weaves. Jacquard looms came into widespread use in the early nineteenth century, and their descendants are still used today. The Jacquard loom is the ancestor not only of modem auto mated machine tools but of the player piano as well.
EXERCISES
I. True or false?
The strong will inherit the earth.
In the beginning was the abacus.
The forerunner of the computer is the mechanical calculator.
The punched card is still very important for computers today.
The calculators Pascal and Leibniz built were reliable.
The mechanical calculator could multiply and divide as well as add and subtract.
Babbage invented the Jacquard loom.
“Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers”. (L. Brandwein)
Give synonyms to:
To aid, strength, to speculate, nothing more than, to lift, ancestors, to manufacture, to single out, precision, to perfect, in recent times, pattern, to develop, information-processing machine.
Give antonyms to:
Descendants, automated machine, exception, virtue, intelligence, to transmit, reliable, sufficient, in the early 19th century, in modern times.
TEXT II. THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE
When was the automatic computer invented? In the 1930s or the 1940s? If you think that, you are only off by a hundred years. A computer that was completely modem in conception was designed in the 1830s. But, as with the calculators of Pascal and Leibniz, the mechanical technology of the time was not prepared to realize the conception.
Charles Babbage. The inventor of that nineteenth-century comput er was a figure far more common in fiction than in real life — an eccentric mathematician. Most mathematicians live personal lives not too much different from anyone else’s. They just happen to do mathematics instead of driving trucks or tunning stores or filling teeth. But Charles Babbage was the exception.
For instance, all his life, Babbage waged a vigorous campaign against London organ grinders. He blamed the noise they made for the loss of a quarter of his working power. Nor was Babbage satis fied with writing anti-organ-grinder letters to newspapers and mem bers of Parliament. He personally hauled individual offenders be fore magistrates (and became furious when the magistrates de clined to throw the offenders in jail).
Or consider this. Babbage took issue with Tennyson’s poem “Vi sion of Sin,’’ which contains this couplet:
Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is bom.
Babbage pointed out (correctly) that if this were true, the popula tion of the earth would remain constant. In a letter to the poet, Babbage suggested a revision:
Every moment dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is bom.
Babbage emphasized that one and a sixteenth was not exact, but he thought that it would be “good enough for poetry.”
Yet, despite his eccentricities, Babbage was a genius. He was a pro
lific inventor, whose inventions include the ophthalmoscope for examining the retina of the eye, the skeleton key, the locomotive “cow catcher,” and the speedometer. He also pioneered operations research, the science of how to carry out business and industrial operations as efficiently as possible.
Babbage was a fellow of the Royal Society and held the chair of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (the same chair once held by Isaac Newton, the most famous British scientist).
The Difference Engine. The mathematical tables of the nineteenth century were full of mistakes. Even when the tables had been calcu lated correctly, printers’ errors introduced many mistakes. And since people who published new tables often copied from existing ones, the same errors cropped up in table after table.
According to one story, Babbage was lamenting about the errors in some tables to his friend Herschel, a noted astronomer. “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” Babbage said. “It is quite possible,” Herschel responded.
(At that time, steam was a new and largely unexplored source of energy. Just as we might wonder today whether or not something could be done by electricity, in the early nineteenth century it was natural to wonder whether or not it could be done by steftm.)
Babbage set out to build a machine that not only would calculate the entries in the tables but would print them automatically as well. He called this machine the Difference Engine, since it worked by solving what mathematicians call “difference equations.” Never theless, the name is misleading, since the machine constructed tables by means of repeated additions, not subtractions.
(The word engine, by the way, comes from the same root as ingenious. Originally it referred to a clever invention. Only later did it come to mean a source of power.)
In 1823, Babbage obtained a government grant to build the Dif ference Engine. He ran into difficulties, however, and eventually abandoned the project. In 1854, a Swedish printer built a working Difference Engine based on Babbage’s ideas.
The Analytical Engine. One of Babbage’s reasons for abandoning the Difference Engine was that he had been struck by a much bet ter idea. Inspired by Jacquard’s punched-card-controlled loom, Babbage wanted to build a punched-card-controlled calculator. Bab bage called his proposed automatic calculator the Analytical En gine.
The Difference Engine could only compute tables (and only those tables that could be computed by successive additions). But the Analytical Engine could carry out any calculation, just as Jac quard’s loom could weave any pattern. All one had to do was to punch the cards with the instructions for the desired calculation. If the Analytical Engine had been completed, it would have been a nineteenth-century computer.
But, alas, the Analytical Engine was not completed. The govern ment had already sunk thousands of pounds into the Difference Engine and received nothing in return. It had no intention of re peating its mistake. Nor did Babbage’s eccentricities and abrasive personality help his cause any.
The government may have been right. Even if it had financed the new invention, it might well have gotten nothing in return. For, as usual, the idea was far ahead of what the existing mechanical tech nology could build.
This was particularly true since Babbage’s design was grandiose. For instance, he planned for his machine to do calculations with fifty-digit accuracy. This is far greater than the accuracy found in most modern computers and far more than is needed for most calculations.
Also, Babbage kept changing his plans in the middle of his projects so that all the work had to be started anew. Although Babbage had founded operations research, he had trouble planning the develop ment of his own inventions.
Babbage’s contemporaries would have considered him more suc cessful had he stuck to his original plan and constructed the Differ
ence Engine. But then he would only have earned a footnote in history. It is for the Analytical Engine he never completed that we honor him as “father of the computer.”
Lady Lovelace. Even though the Analytical Engine was never com pleted, a demonstration program for it was written. The author of that program has the honor of being the world’s first computer programmer. Her name was Augusta Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the poet, Lord Byron.
Ada was a liberated woman at a time when this was hardly fashion able. Not only did she have the usual accomplishments in language and music, she was also an excellent mathematician. The latter was most unusual for a young lady in the nineteenth century. (She was also fond of horse racing, which was even more unusual.)
Ada’s mathematical abilities became apparent when she was only fifteen. She studied mathematics with one of the most well known mathematicians of her time, Augustus de Morgan. At about the time she was studying under de Morgan, she became interested in Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
In 1842, Lady Lovelace discovered a paper on the Analytical En gine that had been written in French by an Italian engineer. She resolved to translate the paper into English. At Babbage’s sugges tion, she added her own notes, which turned out to be twice as long as the paper itself. Much of what we know today about the Analytical Engine comes from Lady Lovelace’s notes.
To demonstrate how the Analytical Engine would work, Lady Love lace included in her notes a program for calculating a certain series of numbers that is of interest to mathematicians. This was the world’s first computer program. “We may say more aptly, Lady Lovelace wrote, “that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Most aptly said indeed!
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