7. Ответьте на вопросы к тексту.

1. What is the difference in older people’s and children’s memories?

2. What is a bad side to cognitive memory?

3. What is the only way to succeed in changing the unwanted behavior?

4. What is enough to remember not to touch a hot stove>

5. What cannot the highly evolved brain capacity guarantee, according to Pr. Rose?

6. What must scientists call upon?

7. What may be the cause of Alzheimer’s disease?

8. Составьте аннотацию к тексту.

9. Составьте реферат текста (10-15 предложений).

10. Составьте план текста и устно перескажите текст.

Вариант 14

1. Переведите тексты на русский язык.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and your family,” said Dr. Robert Darwin, of Shrewsbury, to his son Charles, about 120 years ago. Certainly Charles showed little interest in Latin and Greek, the only subjects taught him at school. He did not do much better as a medical student at Edinburgh. His lectures bored him, but he began to find things out for himself. His first scientific paper, read when he was 16 years old, contained the discovery that what had previously been called the eggs of Flustra, an animal which forms incrustations on seaweed, could swim about, and were really larvae.

He had no liking for a medical career, and when 19 years old was sent to Cambridge to become a clergyman. Once again he did not care for lectures, but showed great zeal in collecting beetles. At 22 he left with a pass degree, and soon afterwards accepted an unpaid post as naturalist on Beagle, whose voyage round the world lasted for five years. He was able to get ashore for weeks at a time, especially in South America. He interested himself in geology and in collecting hitherto unknown animals.

And what he saw started him thinking. He visited islands whose geological structure showed that their rocks had once formed part of the sea bottom, and yet were inhabited by animals found nowhere else, though resembling those on the neighbouring continent. On the prevailing theories these animals must have been specially created. At that time most biologists thought that every species of animals had been created by God in its existing form, and many believed that all animals were descended from ancestors in Noah’s Ark.

Darwin found these ideas strange. He was the first scientist to come up with a compelling alternative to the biblical account of creation. Observing plants and animals during a five-year voyage around the world, Charles Darwin concluded that evolution explains the diversity of living things. In Origin of Species (1859), the English naturalist posited that random mutations may help an organism – a Galapagos finch, say – adapt to its environment. Better equipped for survival, it would also be more likely to pass advantages on to its offspring. Over generations, this process of “natural selection” might give rise to whole new species. Indeed, all life might be descended from a few primitive organisms. Darwin was denounced as a heretic, especially for hinting at an ancestral link between humans and apes. But his theory’s elegance – its ability to explain so many phenomena that had seemed whims of nature – prevailed. Today evolution is as basic to many people’s world view as the idea that the earth circles the sun.

Trying to Explain How Everything Was Built out of Nothing

The whole point of science for the last few hundred years has been to explain everything in terms of a physical process, something that can be described by equations Where did the solar system come from and what set the whole thing revolving? By now, scientists think they have those answers.

The momentum has been in that direction. The whirlpool of cosmic stuff spawned the solar system spins because it is one small part of the great rotating galaxy, the Milky Way. If you want to know where the galaxies came from, there are answers as well. Ultimately, it all comes down to the Big Bang. That is where the chain of reasoning bottoms out. What caused the primordial explosion? At this point all but a few scientists go with Wittgeinstein (“of what we cannot speak we must pass over in silence”).

In explaining gravity as the “bending “ of space-time geometry, Einstein’s theory predicted the expansion of the universe, the primal fact of 20-century astronomy. By imagining the expansion going backward, like a film in reverse, cosmologists have traced the history of the universe back to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang that began it all. But it’s no use asking what happened before the Big Bang. There was no “then” then.

Still, this has not stopped some theorists from trying to imagine how universe made its “quantum leap from eternity into time,” as the physicist Dr. Sidney Coleman of Harvard once put it. However, Dr. Wheeler says, the notion of the universe as something far away and long ago must go. “The past is theory. It has no existence except in the records of the present. We are all participators, at the microscopic level, in making that past as well as the present and the future,” he wrote.

In their dreams, theorists hope that they will discover a law which might explain how time, space and everything else can be built out of nothing, a “law without law”.

Some still hope to find “a theory of the initial conditions of the universe,” a supreme mathematical law showing that the parameters of creation could have been set only in a certain way. But then they would have to find a law to explain where the law came from…and ultimately an explanation of why the universe is mathematical and of where mathematics came from and what numbers are. Like a petulant 8-year-old, we keep asking why, why, why. In the end, the answer is either “just because” or “for God made it so”. Take your pick.

2. Переведите следующие словосочетания на русский язык:

1. do much better; 6. living thing;

2. be a disgrace; 7. natural selection;

3. whims of nature; 8. great zeal;

4. around the world; 9. bottom out;

5. be more likely; 10. primordial explosion

3. Найдите в тексте эквиваленты следующих словосочетаний:

1. научный труд; 6. вращаться вокруг

солнца;

2. большое усердие; 7. открыть закон;

3. неоплачиваемая должность; 8. преобладающие теории;

4. лучше приспособленный; 9. морское дно;

5. расширение вселенной; 10. вращающаяся

галактика

4. Найдите в тексте однокоренные слова, определите, к какой части речи они относятся, и переведите их на русский язык:

1. survive; 6. cosmology;

2. select; 7. erupt;

3. create; 8. create;

4. previous; 9. intend;

5. paid; 10. ultimate

5. Задайте к предложению все типы вопросов: общий, альтернативный, специальный (а) к подлежащему, б) к второстепенному члену предложения), разделительный:

He was the first scientist to come up with a compelling alternative to the biblical account of creation.

6. Найдите и выпишите из данных предложений случаи следующих грамматических явлений: группа времен Indefinite в действительном и страдательном залогах, модальные глаголы и их эквиваленты, степени сравнения прилагательных, притяжательный падеж и множественное число имени существительного:

1. He was able to get ashore for weeks at a time.

2. Charles Darwin concluded that evolution explains the diversity of living things.

3. Over generations, this process of “natural selection” might give rise to whole new species.

4. But his theory’s elegance – its ability to explain so many phenomena – prevailed.

5. In their dreams, theorists hope that they will discover a law which might explain how time, space and everything else can be built out of nothing, a “law without law”.