4. Home Assignment:
1) Make up the list of words you don’t know the meaning of from the texts in Workbook to Unit 9.
2) Do exercises 1, 2 and 3 in Workbook to Unit 9.
3) Find out in the Internet information concerning the topic you really would like to share with other students next class.
Workbook
Unit 9 Computers and Internet
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1. Look through the texts A, B, and C. Write out all the words you do not know the meaning of. Pay special attention to the underlined words and word combinations. Get ready to explain their meaning from the context.
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(А) What exactly is the Internet?
The best way to think of the Internet, or Net as it is often called, is as a vast global network of networks connecting computers across the world. These networks range from government departments and industrial and educational communication systems down to the personal online service providers such as CompuServe, Delphi, etc.
At present, more than 33 million people use the Internet and over three million computers worldwide are-linked in. They use the Net for transferring data, playing games, socializing with other computer users, and sending e-mail (electronic mail).
(B) What is cyberspace?
Cyberspace is the term we give to this entire electronic domain. Whenever you are using one of the online services such as e-mail or the World Wide Web, you are in cyberspace.
Despite the confusing techno-jargon that surrounds it, the Internet is simple: computers talk to one another through a network that uses phone lines, cable, and fibre-optic lines.
(C) How did it begin?
The Net was dreamt up in the late 1960s by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency which decided that, in the event of a nuclear attack, it needed a means by which messages could be sent and received even if phone lines were inoperative. In 1969, there was a network of just four mainframe computers.
By 1972, the number had risen to 40. About this time the idea of the electronic mailbox was born, as users looked for a way of talking to each other electronically. By 1984 when the resources of the network were made available to academics, the Internet began to develop into the form we know it today.
(The text is retrieved from the Internet at http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html
as of 25 March 2012 and modified as compared with the original)
2. Make up three sentences corresponding to each mini-text A, B and C (one sentence per each) to use them as the plan for oral summary next class.
3. Choose one from five broad areas of the Internet given in the text below. Read it, check the meaning of the words you don’t know the meaning of. Be ready to share in some words the information you have got next class.
The Internet can be divided into five broad areas
1 Electronic Mail
E-mail is much faster than traditional or snail mail because once the message is typed out, it arrives in the electronic mailbox of the recipient within minutes or seconds. Anything that can be digitized – pictures, sound, video – can be sent, retrieved, and printed at the other end. This is efficient, convenient, and saves trees!
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2 Information sites This is perhaps the fastest growing area of the Internet as more and more people put their own information pages on line. One thing that computers do very well is process vast amounts of information very fast, so, by specifying a key word or phrase, the computer can then search around the Net until it finds some matches. |
These information sites are usually stored on big computers that exist all over the world. The beauty of the Net is that you can access all of them from your home, using your own PC.