In England, regularly scheduled 30 line television programming was first broadcast by the BBC in September of 1929. At first, only the picture was transmitted for a few hours a week, after regular radio broadcasting was completed for the day of March of 1930, sound and pictures were transmitted together. Because of the poor picture quality, mechanical television was not a success. By 1933 most stations were off the air in the United States. 30 line transmission by the BBC continued until 1935, when electronic television broadcasting started.

Exercise 1: Put five questions to the text.

Exercise 2: Discuss the first stages of television development.

Exercise 3: Form nouns adding the suffixes –er, -or to the given verbs. Translate the nouns and verbs into Russian:

to design – designer

To build, to operate, to contain, to receive, to produce, to transmit, to invent, to discover, to drive, to translate, to convert, to regulate, to accumulate, to react, to use, to vibrate, to record.

Exercise 4: Give the initial words of the following derivatives:

Different, communication, cooker, technological, invisible, equipment, vibration, quickly, responsible, relatively, typical, ceaselessly, probably, magnetic, ultraviolet, announcement, occurrence, transmitter, receiver, organization.

Exercise 5: Make sure if you can read these words correctly and say what words in the Russian language help you to guess their meaning:

Modern, person, phonograph, code, signal, telegraph, symbol, method, diaphragm, experiment, poem, to reproduce, stereo, process, principle, line, microphone, original, laboratory, energy, apparatus, instrument, diameter, type.

Text C. Translate the text in writing.

Since 1980 there have been four more major developments.

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The first is video, which has given viewers the power to control what they watch and when they watch it. These days, fifty percent of homes have a VCR (videocassette recorder) and millions more as being sold every year.

The second is satellite TV. Thanks to DBS (direct broadcast satellites), dozens of new channels are now available to anyone who buys a receiving “dish”. Many of these new channels specialize in one kind of programme – e.g. news, sport, cartoons, music, movies.

The third development is cable – a system of hi-tech wires, which provides even more channels… at a price. But not only that. Cable also makes it possible for you to communicate through your TV.

Fourthly, there’s HDTV (high definition television), which now offers a much clearer and more realistic picture than was possible even a few years ago.

So… more channels, more choice, more clarity. What is there left for TV to achieve in the future? The answer to that is two-way communication. Modern technology means that twenty-first century televisions will be linked to computer databanks. This way, viewers will be able to ask questions (via remote control) about what they’re watching and the answers will appear on their screens. This idea is called “hyper-media” and it’s still at an early stage. But then, as we’ve just seen, TV has come a very long way in a very short time. The hypermedia revolution could happen sooner than many people think.

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