Revision of lessons 10-12

Упражнение 1. Повторите инфинитив, инфинитивные конструкции, со­слагательное наклонение и особенности пассивного залога. Переведите пред­ложения.

1. The Internet is a great place to find and hear hit songs, mov­ies and recorded interviews. 2. It is imperative that the experiment begin at once. 3. If I were you, I should stop the experiment. 4. He wished he were a cosmonaut. 5. A new car model was much spoken about. 6. Nobody saw the professor enter the laboratory. 7. It seems to be an interesting comparison. 8. His experience in the field of materials science can be relied upon. 9. This theory is hard to prove. 10. The new discovery was often referred to. 11. We expect this book to appear in bookshops very soon. 12. Scientists appear to know very little of this phenomenon yet. 13. The main problem is for the report to be published as soon as possible. 14. Materials to be brought back to Earth from space laboratories will have some stable properties. 15. It is unusual for a program to work correctly the first time it is tested. 16. Some experiments on the ISS could re­sult in the development of clocks a thousand times more accurate than today's atomic clocks. 17. There are all kinds of life-support­ing equipment aboard a spacecraft as it is essential that cosmonauts should feel themselves as comfortable as possible. 18. Lasers are supposed to be able to solve a number of very complicated prob­lems connected with medicine. 19. One of the most important re­quirements for hypersonic craft is a sophisticated cooling system lest extreme temperatures should destroy the craft. 20. Educational system suggested by William Rodgers, the founder of MIT, proved to be very effective and to give a sound command of the basic prin­ciples of science and technology. 21. People always wished that there were a device that could vaporize the hardest and the most heat-resistant material. 22. A number of important innovations such as reducing the weight of airplanes and spacecrafts would have been impossible unless composite materials had been developed. 23. Scientists discovered superconductors to possess thermal, elec­tric and magnetic properties quite different from the non-conduct­ing materials. 24. The cost of electricity generation has been influenced by the development of electromagnets made with super­conductors. 25. To produce the superconductive effect, a Dutch physicist cooled a mercury wire below a temperature of —269 °C. 26. We know optical disks to store much more information than a plastic disk of the same size. 27. Laser was dreamt of by mankind

for centuries. 28. The applications of laser in industry and science are known to be numerous and varied. 29. The appearance of laser was followed by the fabrication of ultrathin silicon fibers capable of servicing as lightweight conductors. 30. Some metals and glasses to be cooled down to the point of solidification in space can be brought back to Earth.

Упражнение 2. Прочитайте и переведите текст, обращая внимание на ин­финитивные конструкции.

Programming Languages

The only language computers can understand directly is called machine code. It is known to consist of the Is and 0s (binary code) that are processed by the CPU. However, machine code as a means of communication is very difficult to write. That is why it is neces­sary to use symbolic languages that are easier to understand. Then, by using a special program, these languages can be translated into machine code.

Basic languages, in which the program is similar to the machine code version, are known as low-level languages. In these languages, each instruction is equivalent to a single machine code instruction, and the program is converted into machine code by a special pro­gram called an assembler. These languages are considered to be still quite complex and restricted to particular computers.

To make the program easier to write and to overcome the prob­lem of intercommunication between different types of machines, higher-level languages were developed such as BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, С and others. A higher-level language is a problem oriented programming language, whereas a low-level language is machine oriented. This means that a high-level lan­guage is a convenient and simple means of describing the informa­tion structures and sequences of actions to be performed for a particular task.

A high-level language is independent of the architecture of the computer which supports it. This has two advantages. Firstly, the person writing the program does not have to know anything about the computer the program will be run on. Secondly, programs are portable, that is, the same program can (in theory) be run on differ­ent types of computer. Programs written in one of these languages should be converted by means of a compiler into a lower-level lan­guage or machine code so that the CPU could understand it.

С, a high-level programming language, seems to be very popu­lar today because it is small, so it is not too hard to learn, it is very efficient and portable so one can use it with all kinds of computers. A lot of software engineers use С to write commercial applications programs for mini, micro and personal computers. There are also various versions of С — C⁺⁺ and Objective C, which represent a new style of programming.

At present there is a tendency towards an even higher level of programming languages, which might be called specification lan­guages, and an increasing use of software development tools.

People communicate instructions to the computer in symbolic languages and the easier this communication can be made, the wider the application of computers will be. Scientists are reported to be already working on Artificial Intelligence and the next gener­ation of computers may be able to understand human languages.

Упражнение 3. А. Прочитайте текст упражнения 2 и заполните пропуски словами.

programming compiler programmed program assembler language programmers portable low-level machine code

1. A computer... is a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do. 2. Converting an algorithm into a sequence of instruc­tions in a programming language is called.... 3. Most computer... make a plan of the program before writing it. 4. Coding is the trans­lation of the logical steps into a programming.... 5. In the next century computers will be... in natural languages like English or French. 6. A... is a special program that converts a program written in a high-level language into a program written in a lower level lan­guage. 7. It is difficult to use......, which is the only language un­derstood by the processor. 8. A special program called... converts a program written in a low-level language into machine code. 9. If the same program can be used for different computers, it is called.... 10. In a... language each instruction has a corresponding ma­chine code equivalent.

B. Speak about:

The new programming language you have heard of or read about.