Exercises

1. Find in the text the English equivalents of the following Russian words and word-combinations.

Хранилище данных; объем информации; достичь чего-либо; находить текст; размещение разделов; центры хранения информации; предлагать данные; материалы, относящиеся к; проверить гофер; средство нахождения данных; средства интернета.

2. Find pairs of synonyms among the following words.

To retrieve; means; a program; real; a user; to obtain; a software; a surfer; tools; veritable.

3. Agree or disagree with the following statements. If you agree, say “That’s right’ and repeat it. If you disagree, say “That’s wrong” and correct the statement.

1) The Internet is a veritable storehouse of data;

2) The amount of information available is growing every year.

3) In seconds you can access any of the great libraries in universities.

4) Gopher is a tool for locating entries in information strong centers.

5) Gopher will not offer you the data you are looking for.

6) File transfer protocol is very easy to be learned.

7) The tools “Mosaic” and “WWW” allow access to color, graphics, full-motion video.

8) These Internet tools require plain equipment.

4. Answer the questions.

1) Does the Internet presuppose person-to-data electronic communication?

2) The Internet is a veritable storehouse of data, isn’t it?

3) How long can one access any of the great libraries?

4) What is gopher?

5) What do “gopher holes” specialize in?

6) What does the abbreviation “ftp” stand for? What does it represent?

7) Why is ftp inconvenient to be used?

8) What internet tools allow access to color, graphics, full-motion video, etc.?

9) What is the disadvantage of “Mosaic” and “World Wide Web”?

5. List the Internet tools described in the text. Speak about each of them.

Text 4 the world wide web

Most people really enjoy using the World Wide Web (WWW) because it is so easy, looks and sounds attractive and has an immense wealth of information and data. To take advantage of the Web, you need a really fast and stable connection, a computer that supports graphical environments, and an Internet provider that offers Web service. Therefore, many, if not most, people in the world today still cannot access the Web on a regular basis, for reasons of expense or limitations of technology.

However, even though the Web is still inaccessible to millions of people, it is the WWW that is really driving the Internet today, and it is certainly the wave of the future. The Web has characteristics that no other medium can match. Perhaps the hardest to imagine is the vastness and variety of it, the sheer wonder of the freedom of finding precisely the topic and people that one wants, free of restrictions of time and place. At its most elementary, the “Web” is enticing for 4 important reasons:

1. It is in color, and the color quality is good;

2. It has graphics and attractive formatting capabilities;

3. It can transmit full-motion video;

4. It can transmit sound, including voice and music.

Of course, TV and various other media have these attributes too, so the question can still be posed: what is so special about the World Wide Web? For educators the most revolutionary and important attribute of the Web is hypertext. Essentially, hypertext is a way of presenting material and information in layers, or “stacks”. A piece of text that has hypertext items is prepared in HTML (hypertext markup language), and certain words or phrases in the text are colored differently from the rest of the text. The color coding indicates that if the reader clicks on the colored word with the mouse, another text or set of information will be accessed and revealed. And, most amazing, the source of the second “layer” of information that is thus revealed might be a Web site that is located on a machine thousands of miles away, using seamless hypertext “links”. The second layer of reading that unfolds when the user points with the mouse and “clicks” on a hypertext item may itself include hypertext items; so the layers of reading and search in infinite (or “infiNET”). Hypertext allows one piece of text to be read at varying levels of complexity and depth, which is a boon to teachers. One application for language learners is to have the dictionary “embedded” in the document, so that readers can “click” on a word that they don’t know and immediately get a definition of the word. The Web is not the only place you can find hypertext, though. Most CD-ROMs have hypertext; a good example would be the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia.

The WWW needs 2 important tools in order to be usable: a “search engine” and a “browser”. Obviously, a search engine is necessary if one is to locate anything in the WWW, and there are many useful ones available. The most famous are Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) and Lycos (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/). Perhaps the most useful to academics is Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com). In any case most World Wide Web service providers supply several search engines. They generally all work the same way: users type in keywords that represent the item that they are interested in finding, and then the search engine goes to work, searching all the linked computers of the world, and then comes back with a list of “sites” where the keyword has been found. However, no Web document is readable without a sort of interpreter or reader, called a “browser”, which will turn the meaningless machine hieroglyphics of the Internet into readable material and gorgeous pictures and sound. The most famous browsers are Netscape Navigator (http://home.netscape.com/) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (http://microsoft.com/).