The floppy drive

Floppy drives provide a way to pass files to and from the hard drive or to and from another computer. At Gateway 2000, we install either of two types of floppy disk drives:

■ 3.5-inch 1,44MB drives, usually drive A:

■ Combo drives (includes both a 3.5-inch 1 44MB drive and a 5.25-inch 1 2MB drive, called drive A: and drive B: respectively).

The drives can read and write on floppy diskettes. If you put a brand new diskette into the drive, the computer cannot read it. You have to format it first

The hard drive

Unlike the floppy drive, the hard disk drive is inside the computer's case and you cannot see it. Usually it is referred to as drive C:. Hard drives also hold a LOT of data. The smallest hard drives Gateway 2000 offers hold more information than 100 floppies! The size of a hard drive is measured in megabytes, or MB for short

The CD-ROM drive

The CD-ROM drive installed m your Gateway 2000 computer is similar to the one(s) you might have in your home or car. It can play music CDs as well as read software program CDs and the new Kodak photo CDs.

The amount and variety of material you can access with CD-ROM is amazing, particularly when you realize that a CD disc holds over 600MB of data! As far as your computer is concerned, the CD-ROM is just another hard drive, except that, although you can read from it, you can't save anything to it

To operate the drive, press the Eject button to open the tray. Put a CD in the tray (label side UP!) and gently start to push the tray in. The motor takes over and pulls the tray the rest of the way in.

You can play ordinary music CDs if your system has speakers or if you plug earphones into the jack in the front of the drive

NOTES TO THE TEXT

¹ video card - видеокарта

² display adapter card - видеоадаптер (системное плато, генерирующее сигна­лы для получения изображения на мониторе)

b) Find in the text the passage describing the usage of the mouse and translate it into Russian.

c) Read this passage aloud and translate it. Approximate time of reading is 1,6 minutes.

d) Reread the text and write a summary of it in English.

e) Find the key words to describe a computer.