Computers concern you

1. When Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge

University, invented the first calculating machine in 1812 he could hardly

have imagined the situation we find ourselves in today.

2. Nearly everything we do in the modern world is helped, or even

controlled, by computers, the complicated descendants of his simple

machine. Computers are being used more and more extensively in the

world today, for the simple reason that they are far more efficient than

human beings. They have much better memories and can store huge

amounts of information, and they can do calculations in a fraction of the

time taken by a human mathematician. No man alive can do 500,000 sums

in one second, but an advanced computer can. In fact, computers can do

many of the things we do, but faster and better. They can pay wages,

reserve seats on planes, control machines in factories, work out

tomorrow's weather, and even play chess, write poetry, or compose music.

3. Robot really means a workman, not a mechanical monster. It is

one of the very few Slav words (in this case Czech) borrowed in the

English language. It comes from the old Slav word robu, which means a

servant. In modern Slav, the word robotnik means «workman» and is

linked to the Russian word for work, robota.

4. Robot came into general use in English only after 1923, following

the great success of a play by a Czech author Karl Capek (1890-1938).

Capek's play was called R.U.R. which stood for Rossurn 's Universal

Robots. It was about mechanical automatons that did the work of men, and

were efficient but soulless. In the play, society exploited them, came to

depend utterly on them, and was destroyed by them when they revolted.

Since then, the term robot has come to mean a mechanical man, often in

recognizable human form, as well as a non-human-looking machine that

does work formerly only handled by men.

5. Since the early days of Capek's play robot must have found its

way into the dictionaries of every modem language but in its own original

language there is no sense of a mechanical man, just of an ordinary

worker.

б) Прочитайте текст еще раз. Проверьте, как вы поняли текст,

выбрав правильный ответ, соответствующий его содержанию:

1. The ascendant of modern computers is ...

a) a robot

b) the first calculating machine

c) a mechanical monster

2. «Robot» is one of the few words borrowed from ...

a) English

b) Czech

c) Russian

3. It was not until... that the word «robot» began to be widely used in

modern languages.

a) 1812

b) 1938

c) 1923

d) 890

VII. Перепишите и письменно переведите на русский язык 2, 4

абзацы.