7. Ответьте на вопросы к тексту:

1. What were the priorities of the exhibition promoters by the end of the 19^th century?

2. When was it that the great exhibitions had their “hay day”?

3. What were the problems Victorian physicists were working on?

4. What does a very early version of an electromagnetic motor look like?

5. Why was it impossible in the 1830’s to know if the electromagnetic machine was economically viable?

6. What sort of machine was a sort of predecessor of the gramophone?

7. What three Faraday’s inventions are still fundamental to the way electricity works today?

8. Составьте аннотацию к тексту.

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

10. Составьте план текста и устно перескажите текст.

Вариант 5

1. Переведите текст на русский язык.

Human Memory Research

There are few things more complicated or multidimensional than memory. It is the ultimate time travel machine allowing us to connect to other people and past events. Memories can also be the catalyst for wars as well as the stuff dreams are made of.

Memories come in a variety of forms from highly selective to repressed. So-called institutional memory makes us wiser in governing others. All animals have some form of memory. It is basic to survival.

Memory is really the interface of human experience. All of us have got memory. All of us, even every single cell, every single molecule in our body change many, many times during our life time.

We can remember things at 80 or 90 that happened to us when we were children. Memory is the most unique feature of humans. You can imagine having a heart transplant or liver transplant and you’ll still be you. Think of having a memory transplant, and you are not you. Memory is the most dynamic thing within the brain. It’s not like a computer store. It’s something which moves and shifts and gets classified in different ways, because, of course, we remember in many different ways.

Trying to remember a person that you saw a few days ago you remember him, perhaps, by his face, perhaps, by his name, perhaps, by the context in which you saw him. Or, perhaps, he was wearing such and such a sort of clothes. And these different ways of classifying the memory that you’ve got are reflected in different places in which the memories are stored in the brain.

The human brain is constantly changing. Up until the last twenty years or so researchers believed that people’s brains were hard wired from the moment of birth. Humans, it was thought, came into the world with all the brain capacity they would ever need or use. But beginning in the early 1970’s the concept of brain plasticity emerged.

Detailed investigations revealed constant changes in brain chemistry and the influence of fluctuating hormone levels on that chemistry. This prompted neuroscientists to revise their theory of the brain as a static organ.

If our brains are constantly changing during adulthood, imagine the changes they undergo in young children. A tiny infant is born with a mind that is little more than a blank slate. The amount of information that is processed in the first year is truly astounding.

Our earliest memories from childhood are different in quality and texture from teenage and adult memories. Whereas older people can remember things that happened to them as grown-ups in vivid detail, children’s memories are similar to snapshot images. These types of juvenile remembrances, according to Professor Rose, are called “ideatic memories” after the Greek word for “image”. This means that you see things like pictures. So children have that sort of photographic memory and most of us lose it as we get to about 8 or 10 or 12, something like that.

As adults our brains learn to sort pieces of information. Experts say that things that are remembered for a half hour or longer have the potential to be stored away as long-term memory. Other bits of information seem to evaporate into thin air if we don’t take much notice of them or if they are no longer useful.

Mortimer Myshkin is Chief of the Neuropsychology Laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health near Washington, DC. He is considered America’s leading authority on the mechanisms of memory. Dr. Myshkin says there are two ways in which we learn or remember information.

The first type of memory – a temporary or so-called cognitive memory – is very fast and flexible. It allows people to remember something or someone after only a single brief exposure. But Dr. Myshkin says there is a bad side to cognitive memory. That is, that we often want to remember things and cannot. So, that’s the cost of this really marvelous and flexible system.

The other system seems to have the opposite kinds of benefits and costs. This second system of recall is known as behavioral learning or stimulus response learning. Anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking or lose weight knows that about the only way to succeed is through behaviour modification that is making a conscious effort to change the unwanted behaviour.

But there is much about this system of behavioral learning that you wouldn’t want to change. For example, you only have to touch a hot stove once to remember not to do that again.

Stephen Rose, the Director of Brain and Behaviour Research at Open University of London, suggests that all of the highly evolved brain capacity in the world is no guarantee that humans won’t kill each other.

To avoid this, scientists must call upon their collective memories of past mistakes and atrocities. The holocaust is a prime example. During the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s the Nazi-led government of Germany exterminated 11 million people from throughout Europe whom they considered undesirable.

Many who lived through that traumatic era might try to suppress their personal memories of the holocaust or even to say that it didn’t happen. But as a civilization we have a responsibility to learn and remember.

Amnesia is a frequent subject of mystery novels and television dramas. Yet, forgetting who you are and where you came from is extremely rare. Much more common and devastating are incurable disorders of memory, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

People with a progressive condition called Alzheimer’s disease vividly remember events of fifty or sixty years ago but little else. Alzheimer’s disease can be described as a holocaust of the mind in which all incoming thoughts are exterminated almost from the moment they are acknowledged. Each new assault on the memory brings fear, confusion and despair to the Alzheimer’s sufferers who are mostly elderly and the people close to them.

Among numerous theories struggling to explain what causes the short-term memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease there is the one that is consistent with the newer theory about brain plasticity. It states that in Alzheimer’s patients brain cells whose primary job is to retain new information die off and are replaced by other brain cells that are in charge of forgetting information which is also a very important memory function.

In effect, Alzheimer’s patients are walking around with misfired brains. It is likely to take many more years of research before this and other theories about brain function and memory can be proved.

The future of memory research will be devoted to trying to understand the circuitry and chemistry that underlie different types of memory.

2. Переведите следующие словосочетания на русский язык

1. cognitive memory; 6. in the early 1970’s;

2. our earliest memories; 7. long-term memory;

3. temporary memory; 8. behaviour modification;

4. very fast and flexible; 9. juvenile remembrances;

5. brain capacity; 10. concept of brain

plasticity

3. Найдите в тексте эквиваленты следующих словосочетаний:

1. установочная память; 6. от высоко избирательных

до подавляемых;

2. познавание на основе 7. поистине потрясающий;

побудительной реакции;

3. прочно запрограммированный; 8. поведенческое

познавание;

4. преимущества и издержки; 9. идеатичные

воспоминания;

5. разнообразные способы 10. быть основой

сортировки воспоминания; запоминания

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

1. research; 6. behavior;

2. investigate; 7. govern;

3. adult; 8. desirable;

4. wanted; 9. curable;

5. child; 10. trauma

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

It allows people to remember something or someone after only a single brief exposure.

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. Memory is the most unique feature of humans.

2. You can imagine having a heart transplant and you’ll still be you.

3. It’s something that moves and shifts and gets classified in different ways.

4. A tiny infant is born with a mind that is little more than a blank slate.

5. Experts say that things that are remembered for a half hour or longer have the potential to be stored away as long-term memory.