Lesson 11

Ving forms

Part one

Grammar

I

General

1. Read the following.

Human beings are to go back to the Moon within the next 15 years and this time they will stay, according to ambitious plans to establish a lunar base announced by Nasa.

The goal is to establish a full-time human presence by 2024, with astronauts spending six-month tours at the lunar base. The station will operate chiefly as a science laboratory preparing for manned missions to Mars, developing and testing survival technology and serving as a staging post for flights to the Red Planet. Nasa has decided now that this should involve a permanent base after canvassing the opinions of more than 1,000 scientists from 14 countries, including Britain, and is open to the idea of making the outpost an international project.

Nasa officials said that the scheme would have to be accomplished within the agency's existing budget, though they would not be drawn on how much it would cost.

2. Answer the question.

What functions do the parts in bold perform in the sentences?

II

Functions

Subject

1. Translate the sentences.

1. Taking a single page and turning it into a three-dimensional pattern isn't much use in itself.

2. Remaining in this barrier is the problem of decoherence; much work on error-correcting techniques still needs to be done to compensate for results of the difficulties of working on such a small scale.

3. Programming computers to equal human abilities will require fresh insights into human psychology.

4. Changing patterns of rainfall will lead to local shortages of food and safe drinking water.

5. Working out of how bad such an event would be is an urgent but very difficult ethical problem.

6. Making these applications faster and more accurate has generally meant throwing more number-crunching capacity at them.

7. Putting causalty back into quantum-generational models is the only known cure for the instabilities of superposed spacetime geometries.

8. Using wrapper software to protect legacy code is a proven technology in the security community.

9. Turning CO2 into fuels is exactly what photosynthetic organisms have been doing for billions of years.

Adverbial modifier

1. Translate the sentences.

1. Pursuing such technology, you take electricity and combine CO2 with hydrogene to make gasoline.

2. The company would like to improve the process mimicking the process of photosynthesis.

4. Using nothing but sunlight and CO2, genetically engineered plant life produces fuel – common gasoline.

5. Looking into the hologram, someone “sees” the object even though it may no longer be present.

6. The atomic force microscope is a powerful tool in physics, able to image individual atoms by relying on a tiny probe dragged across a surface.

7. In characterizing the difficulties presented by these four properties, their inconsistencies with higher level languages are emphasized.

8. By clever design Cray cut the distances signals had to travel, thereby speeding up the machines.

9. These spacecraft however, were only able to spend a few weeks collecting detailed data on Saturn and its 34 known moons – not enough to fully understand the forces at work in those intriguing rings.

10. By elevating the electrode above the rest of the assembly, the level of access can be increased, although that comes at the cost of weakening the strength of the trap.

Subject vs. adverbial modifier

1. Translate the sentences paying attention to the function of the Ving form.

1. Analyzing data from the Mars rovers, physicists are doing their best to find the answers for many problems.

2. Choosing the best algorithm and sifting out the essential data are central to the art of machine learning.

3. Using an alphabet of four symbols and making use of only seven states, this table consists of just 28 instructions.

4. Using such ultracold atoms is important because they begin to fall within a vacuum chamber.

5. Carrying excess fat, Americans are at increased risk of death from heart disease, diabetes and various kinds of cancer.

6. Preparing for manned missions to Mars, developing and testing survival technology and serving as a staging post for flights to the Red Planet, the station will operate chiefly as a science laboratory.

7. Heating a building can be done passively, but with the use of a fan in the solar thermal system, the people inside the building can stay much warmer since the air will be circulated.

8. Standing on the threshold of the fifth generation, we clearly expect more from future computers than just more speed.

Attribute