Simply, quickly, actually, finally, nearly, however, despite.
II. Answer the following questions in pairs:
- Did Caselli’s “fax machine” actually work?
- Who designed the first steam engine?
- Who built the first steam engine?
- Who invented the first telephone?
III.Discussthe following questions in pairs:
1. Which information in the article did you already know?
2. Which information did you find more surprising?
IV. Discuss with your partner the following statement: “So, what do you need for an invention to be a success?” and make a conclusion to your groupmates.
On/offline activity
Divide into groups of 3 or 4 people and find the information from the Internet about different inventions (for ex., e-mail, ballpoint, personal computer, video recorder, dishwasher, etc.) and present the information on:
- the name of the inventor;
- the country this invention was made in;
- what the thing was made for;
- how it is used now;
- how it influenced our life.
Recommended resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail#Origin;
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo30/history_ballpoint_pen.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E05EEDC1530F93BA35752C0A9619C8B
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-11475-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=40652&messageID=751218
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/07/yourmoney/mobile.php
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax
Online activity
Writing an e-mail (to a friend)
Work in pairs
There are no fixed rules about composing e-mails, especially to friends. But a friend will be surprised if you write in a formal style. An e-mail is rather like a conversation without the pauses and hesitations.
Read this e-mail from your friend Alex:
Hello! How are you? It’s a long time since I last heard from you. What is your news? How are your family? Are you still studying English? How are you getting on with it? How was your holiday? Where did you go and what did you do? Best wishes, Alex. |
Leo Jones, Making progress, Cambridge University Press
Before you write a reply, decide what you will say to Alex.
Write your reply to Alex.
Show your reply to a partner, and read his or her reply.
Homework
Write an adventure story about the invention which plays an important part in your life now in the Past Simple Tense and using new words from the lesson:
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simply, quickly, actually, finally, nearly, however, despite, really, however.
Reply to your friend about your day, study, life...
Lesson 5
Lexical exercises
Match the words and their suitable definitions given below:
Invention, to explode, dynamite, powerful, closet, iron, bulb, fortune, phonograph, discovery, genius, to carry out, research.
the lighting or heating device of a various kind and the device;
something that someone has made, designed or created, that did not exist before;
subsidiary room in an apartment house;
outstanding abilities, talent, talent in the certain field of activity;
the first device for mechanical record and reproduction of a sound;
to do a particular piece of work;
LISTENING
Listen to the text “Inventors and their inventions” and fill in the chart.
Inventor | Invention | Year of invention | Country |
Samuel Colt | |||
Rudolf Diesel | |||
Samuel Morse | |||
Charles Macintosh | |||
Charles Rolls, Henry Royce | |||
Gottlieb Daimler, Charles Benz |
Lead-in
- Do you use the Internet?
- How often do you write e-mails?
- Do you know who invented the e-mail and when?
READING
I. Read the text
The man who invented e-mail
Ray Tomilson is the man who invented e-mail. Back in 1971 he was working in a team of programmers who were working on a program called SNDMSG (‘send a message’) that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for one another – a sort of single-computer version of an e-mail system. They were working on the ARPANET, which was set up by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency to connect different research computers, and which later developed into the internet.
Ray wanted to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn’t occur naturally in people’s names and that wasn’t a digit. He chose @ symbol to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other distant hostrather than being local – and @ symbol is the only preposition on the keyboard. Before this, the purpose of the @ sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). At the time Ray says he gave it only ’30 to 40 seconds of thought’.
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To test the program he sent a message to another computer. The message was something quite forgettable, and he has now forgotten what it was. Electronic mail is now known as e-mail or email. Domain names (apple.com, cambridge.org, etc.) were not used until 1984. Before that each host was only known by its IP (Internet protocol) address number.
Ray’s ideas changed the world and made a lot of others rich, but not him. ‘Innovations is sometimes rewarded’, he says modestly, ‘but not this innovation!’
Leo Jones, Making progress, Cambridge University Press
I. Find synonyms from the text to the following explanations:
to differentiate; the first part of a website’s address, which usually begins with ‘www.’ and ends with ‘com’, ‘.org’, ’uk’, or other letters that show which country the website is from.
II. True or False?
- The symbol @ meant the only preposition on the keyboard before Ray started to use it.
- It took Ray too much time to decide to use @.
- He has forgotten his first message.
- Ray’s idea made him very rich.
II. Read the article
Louis von Ahn
E-mail users hate “spam”, and the people who send spam hate Louis fon Ahn. They use programs called spambots to steel e-mail addresses. To stop them, von Ahn developed a visual test involves recognising distorted words, letters and numbers. Humans can pass the CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and Human Apart”, but spambots cannot. Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are decoded by people every day. Then von Ahn started thinking about using the method to digitize books. Pages are scanned into computers that convert images into text. But computers cannot recognize distorted letters. That’s where humans can help, says von Ahn. The solution is to send unclear texts in the form of CAPATCHAs for people to decode. Born in Guatemala City, 30-year-old von Ahn teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pensylvania.
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Business Spotlight, 2/08
Try to give the explanation of the following words from the text:
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