7. Translate into English:

1. По изучаемым объектам биологию подразделяют на отдельные науки.

2. Все поддисциплины биологии подчинены общим законам и закономерностям развития живой природы, которые изучает общая биология.

3. Основные различия между растительными и животными организмами обусло­вили разделение их по способу питания.

4. Среди основных направлений биологии усиленно развивается область изучения жи­вой материи, использующая методы и подходы химии, физики и математики.

5. Общебиологические закономерности используются при решении самых разных во­просов во многих отраслях народного хозяйства.

8. Speak on the following:

• biology as the science of life;

• scientists dealing with the concept of biology;

• object biology studies;

• subdivisions of biology which contributed much to the development of biology;

• recent advances in biology.

9. Render the article into English:

Живое представлено необычайным разнообразием форм, множеством видов жи­вых существ. В настоящее время уже известно около 500 тыс. видов растений и более 1,5 миллионов видов животных, населяющих нашу планету, кроме того, ученые постоянно описывают новые виды, как существующие, так и вымершие в минувшие геологические эпохи. Выявление и объяснение общих свойств и многообразия живых организмов – за­дача общей биологии. В рассматриваемых общей биологией проблемах важное место занимают вопросы происхождения жизни на Земле и законы ее развития, а также взаи­мосвязь различных групп живых организмов между собой и взаимодействие их с окру­жающей средой. Среди основных направлений биологии усиленно развивается физико-химическая биология, но уже сегодня можно отметить значительные достижения в об­ласти биохимии, молекулярной биологии и биофизики.

Translate the text into Russian using a dictionary.

Text b The Beginning of Biology

Biology is the study of living organisms and as soon as man's mind developed to the point where he was conscious of himself as an object from the unmoving and un­feeling ground upon which he stood, a form of biology began. For uncounted centuries, however, biology was not in the form we would recognize as a science. Men were bound to attempt to cure themselves and others of ailments, to try to alleviate pain, re­store health, and ward off death.

Again, men could not help but observe the living machi­nery of the animal organism, whenever a creature was cut up by butchers for food or by priests for sacrifice. And yet such attention as was devoted to the detailed features of organs was not with the intent of studying their workings but for the purpose of learning what information they might con­vey con­cerning the future. The early anatomists were the diviners who forecast the fate of kings and nations by the shape and appearance of the liver of a ram.

Undoubtedly, much useful information was gathered over the ages, even under the overpowering influence of supersti­tion. The men who embalmed mummies so skillfully in an­cient Egypt had to have a working knowledge of human ana­tomy.

Nevertheless, as long as men believed the universe to be under the absolute domin­ion of capricious demons, as long as they felt the natural to be subordinate to the super­natural, progress in science had to be glacially slow. The best minds would naturally de­vote themselves not to the study of the visible world, but to attempts to reach, through in­spiration or revelation, an understanding of the invisible and controlling world beyond.

To be sure, individual men must now and then have rejected this view and concen­trated on the study of the world as it was revealed through the senses. These men, however lost and submerged in a hostile culture, left their names unrecorded and their influence unfelt.

It was the ancient Greeks who changed that. They were a restless people, curious, intelligent, argumentative, and, at times, irreverent. About 600 В. С., there arose in Ionia (the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey) a series of philoso­phers, who began a movement that was to change all that.

The Ionian philosophers ignored the supernatural and supposed, instead, that af­fairs of the universe followed a fixed and unalterable pattern. They assumed the existence of causality; that is, that every event had a cause, and that a particular cause inevitably produced a particular effect, with no danger of change by a capri­cious will. A further assump­tion was that the "natural law" that governs the uni­verse was of such a kind that the mind of man could encompass it and could deduce it from first principles or from observa­tion.

This point of view dignified the study of the universe. It maintained that man could understand the universe and gave the assurance that the understanding, once gained, would be permanent.

Little is known of these early Ionian philosophers: their works are lost. But their names survive and the central core of their teachings as well. Moreover the philosophy of "rationalism" (the belief that the workings of the universe could be understood through reason rather than revelation), which began with them, has never died.

Rationalism entered biology when the internal machinery of the animal body came to be studied for its own sake, rather than as transmitting devices for divine messages.

The most important name to be associated with the ratio­nalistic beginnings of biol­ogy, however, is that of Hippocra­tes. Virtually nothing is known about the man himself except that he was born and lived on the island of Cos just off the Ionian coast. On Cos was a temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. The temple was the near­est equivalent to today's medical school, and to be accepted as a priest there was the equivalent of obtaining a modern medical degree.

Hippocrates's great service to biology was that of reducing Asclepius to a purely honor­ary position. No god influenced medicine in Hippocratic view. To Hippocrates, the healthy body was one in which the component parts worked well and harmoniously, whereas a diseased body was one in which they did not. It was the task of the physician to observe closely in order to see where the flaws in the working were, and then to take the proper action to correct those flaws. The proper action did not consist of prayer or sacrifice, of driv­ing out demons or propitiating gods. It consisted chiefly of allowing the patient to rest, seeing that he was kept clean, had fresh air, and simple and wholesome food. Any form of excess was bound to overbalance the body's work­ings in one respect or another, so there was to be moderation in all things.

In short, the physician's role, in the Hippocratic view, was to let natural law it­self affect the cure. The body had self-corrective devices, which should be given every opportu­nity to work. In view of the limited knowledge of medicine, this was an ex­cellent point of view.

Hippocrates founded a medical tradition that persisted for centuries after his time. The physicians of this tradition placed his honored name on their writings so that it is impossible to tell which of the books are actually those of Hippocrates him­self. The "Hippocratic oath", for instance, which is still recited by medical graduates at the moment of receiving their degrees, was most certainly not written by him and was, in fact, probably not composed until some six centuries after his time. On the other hand, one of the oldest of the Hippocratic writings dealt with the disease epi­lepsy, and Hippocrates himself may well have written this. If so, it is an excellent example of the arrival of rationalism in biology.

In the book "On Sacred Disease", written about 400 B.C. possibly by Hip­pocrates himself, he maintained that it was useless, generally, to attribute divine causes to disea­ses, and that there was no reason to consider epilepsy an exception. Epilepsy, like all other diseases, had a natural cause and a rational treatment. If the cause was not known and the treatment uncertain, that did not change the prin­ciple.

All of modern science cannot improve on this view and if one were to insist on seek­ing for one date, one man, and one book as the beginning of the science of biology, one could do worse than point to the date 400 B.C., the man Hippocrates, and the book "On Sacred Disease".