8633

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3.That's the best presentation ______________

a)I never heard

b)I didn't hear

c)I heard

d)I've ever heard

4.He's the most creative person _____________________

a)I never met.

b)I never meet.

c)I've ever met.

d)I've never met.

5.___________________ to him last week.

a)I spoke

b)I've already spoken

c)I didn't spoke

d)I speaked

6.The reason I look so brown is that _______________ from a business trip to Spain.

a)I come back

b)I came back

c)I never came back

d)I've just come back

7.It's obvious that ________________ your homework.

a)you haven't done

b)you didn't do

c)you don't do

d)you do not

Do you know where the world largest high-tech centres are situated?

Have you ever heard of the name “Silicon Valley”? What is it famous for?

1. Read the text and answer the questions.

1.Where did the name “Silicon Valley” come from? How is it connected with semiconductors?

2.Why is Frederick Terman called "the father of Silicon Valley"?

3.What helps Silicon Valley keep its leading position among other high-tech centres?

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The Information Age has arrived and certainly information is easier to get hold of than it ever was before. Where do you usually get information from? How do you store it? (paper,

computer etc.) Have you ever had problems with information storage?

Which of the following words do you associate with information overload?

Read the article about information overload and compare your ideas with it.

Data, data everywhere

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been accumulated in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a colossal 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large

Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is going to come into operation in Chile in 2016, will get that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress. Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years

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billion-2 billion people use the internet.

By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications devices. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value and provide fresh insights into science.

But they are also creating lots of new problems. Despite the large quantity of tools to collect, process and share all this information — sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see the chart). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the rapid increase of data is making them

increasingly inaccessible. “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry,” he says.

Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have created a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.

(Adapted from The Economist print edition www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15557443&source=hptextfeature)

2. What do these numbers refer to?

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2.Try and answer these questions.

1.What is the population of your a) country? b) city?

2.How many people study at your university?

3.How many mobile-phone subscriptions are there in your country?

4.How many members are there in a) your social network? b) most popular social network?

5.What percentage of people in your country uses the Internet?

If you want to know some more statistics go online to Internet World Statistics http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

3. Listen to the extract about The “Big” Information Problem and fill in the gaps with the numbers you hear.

The “Big” Information Problem: Volume

Perhaps the first thing which comes to mind when thinking about information overload is the quantity of information that must be examined. Often, we sort through large quantities of information just to locate the small piece that we need.

In every …...-hour period approximately …… words of technical information are being recorded. A reader capable of reading …… words per minute would require …… months, reading …… hours every day, to get through …… day's technical output, and at the end of that period, he would have fallen …… years behind in

his reading!

Consider that more new information has been produced within the last …… decades, than in the last ……. Over …… periodicals are published in the United States each year, and almost …… books are published daily around the world.

…… result of having all of this information available, is an increased difficulty in finding the particular information for which we are searching. We have to determine which information is useful, which is

not, and where to look next when necessary.