Exercise 3. Answer the questions and give your own ideas based on your knowledge.
1. How can people be encouraged to become organ donors? For what reasons might people not wish to donate their organs?
2. Pigs are now being genetically manipulated to carry human genes. Do you think this is ethical? Why, why not?
3. What possible alternatives do you think there are to using animal transplants?
4. Having read the article, do you think animal transplants seem too risky? Why, why not?
5. Who should make the decision to go ahead with research into animal transplants – doctors, lawyers, politicians?
6. Most research is being done by commercial, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. One estimate suggests a potential market of $5 billion for sales of drugs associated with animal transplants. Do you think other organisations should be doing the research? Why, why not?
7. In what other ways do animals help the advance of human medicine? Should we continue to use them? Do animals have any rights themselves?
8. Would you be happy to receive an animal's organ if you were seriously ill?
9. What animals are used as donors and what for?
10. What social and ethical problems do you think animal transplants raise?
Text 3
Exercise 1. Read the text using the dictionary when necessary.
You know that you're doing something big when your company name becomes a verb. Ask Xerox. In 1959 they created the first plain paper copy machine. It was one of the most successful products ever. The company name Xerox grew into a verb that means "to copy", as in "Bob, can you Xerox this for me?" Around 50 years later, the same thing happened to Google. Their company name grew into a verb that means "to do an internet search". Now everyone and their grandma knows what it means to Google it. Unlike Xerox, Google wasn't the first company to invent their product, not by a long shot. Lycos released their search engine in 1993. Yahoo! came out in 1994. AltaVista began serving results in 1995. Google did not come out until years later, in 1998. Though a few years difference may not seem like much, this is a major head start in the fast moving world of tech. So how did Google do it? How did they overtake their competitors who had such huge leads in time and money? Maybe one good idea made all the difference. There are millions and millions of sites on the internet. How does a search engine know which ones are relevant to your search? This is a question that great minds have been working on for decades.
To understand how Google changed the game, you need to know how search engines worked in 1998. Back then most websites looked at the words in your query. They counted how many times those words appeared on each page. Then they might return pages where the words in your query appeared the most. This system did not work well and people often had to click through pages and pages of results to find what they wanted. Google was the first search engine that began considering links. Links are those blue underlined words that take you to other pages when you click on them. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, believed that meaningful data could be drawn from how those links connect. Page figured that websites with many links pointing at them were more important than those that had few. He was right. Google's search results were much better than their rivals. They would soon become the world's most used search engine. It wasn't just the great search results that led to Google becoming so well liked. It also had to do with the way that they presented their product. Most of the other search engines were cluttered. Their home pages were filled with everything from news stories to stock quotes. But Google's homepage was, and still is, clean. There's nothing on it but the logo, the search box, and a few links. It almost appears empty. In fact, when they were first testing it, users would wait at the home page and not do anything. When asked why, they said that they were, "waiting for the rest of the page to load". People couldn't imagine such a clean and open page as being complete. But the fresh design grew on people once they got used to it. These days Google has its hands in everything from self-driving cars to helping humans live longer. Though they have many other popular products, they will always be best known for their search engine. The Google search engine has changed our lives and our language. Not only is it a fantastic product, it is a standing example that one good idea (and a lot of hard work) can change the world.
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