ТЕКСТ 2
1. Прочтите текст, ответьте на вопрос: «О чем этот текст?». Сформулируйте его тему. Запишите ответ в 1-2 предложениях.
ILLITERATE JAPANESE
At Kameido No.3 Junior High School in northeast Tokyo, Masanobu Hyakutake is using computers to teach algebra to a class of rowdy seventh graders. Because there are 40 students in the сlass and only 12 personal computers, three or four students are crowded around each screen. But the computers are little more than electronic blackboards. The students habitually push the keyboards out of the way and gaze at numbers on the screens. When working out problems they use pencils and paper. After class, Hyaimtake admits that the students say that they enjoy their lessons more when they сan work with the computer - but that doesn't happen very often. “We just don’t have the software”, he laments.
Kameido No.3 is supposed to be a model school for computer education in Japan, but it more often illustrates the computer illiteracy that afflicts what is arguably the most technology-oriented country in the world. While Japanese primary and secondary schools earn praise for their students’ performance in math and science, they lag behind the United States and Europe in computer education. Surveys show that although 94 percent of public high schools in Japan (and 36 percent of junior highs) have Pc’s, the vast majority are used for administrative purposes - not for teaching. According to the most recent government figures available, only 10 percent of Japan’s public academic high schools have a computerized classroom. Most designated computer classroom lack the hardware to allow each student hands-on access; those that have a sufficient number of Pc's don’t have adequate educational software programs for the students. Masatоshi Seimiya, an administrator at CEC, says: “We are behind”.
rowdy — шумный
aptly — легко, надлежащим образом to afflict — поражать, огорчать
earn praise — заслуживать похвалы
2.Объясните, в чем заключается главная мысль (идея), текста? Запишите свой ответ в 1-2 предложениях.
3.Ответьте на вопрос: «Какова цель и назначение данного текста?» Запишите свой ответ в 2-3 предложениях.
4.Составьте краткий реферат (аннотацию) этого текста, используя записанные предложения и рекомендации предыдущего раздела.
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ТЕКСТ 3
THE FUTURE OF ENGINEERING
What will engineering be like in the future? Every now and then I think about how much it has changed over the course of my own career. If changes of a similar magnitude happen in the coming decades, what will the profession be like for today's college students?
Today we soar on the wings of computers and networking to heights where the minutiae of engineering lie indistinguishable on the ground far below. Sometimes I think of Archimedes’ lever: "Give the place to stand on, and I can move the earth" We've been given the lever and the place to stand upon, and feel that the earth is ours to move.
That feeling of empowerment is exhilarating. My worry is the price that we have paid for soaring so far above the landscape. In our profession there is a growing distancing from reality. It is like the profound feeling of disconnection I have when I stare out the window of an airplane. Those aren't real houses down there, I think, and I'm not really sitting in an aluminum tube high in the sky with no visible means of support. Why does the pilot tell me that the outside temperature is-50°C? This has no meaning to me, because the outside world is merely a diorama painted on my window. But as soon as these troubling thoughts intrude, the flight attendant's voice supervenes, telling me to lower my window shade so that I can better see the movie, substituting one form of unreality for another.
Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane. Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they? Watching the simulations on my computer monitor is like watching the movie on the airplane - an unreality wrapped in another unreality. I feel that I have lost touch with Edison's world of electricity - a world of black Bakelite meters, whirring motors, acrid chemical smells, and heated conductors. I miss Heathkits and the smell of molten solder and burning insulation - the sensual aspects of engineering that have been replaced for many of us by antiseptic, ubiquitous, and impersonal CRTs.
I have a deeper worry that math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us. I walk down the aisles of laboratories, and I see engineers staring vacantly into monitors, their desks piled high with anachronistic paper detritus. Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations? Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests that embeds its capability in shrink-wrapped, encrypted software.
I can't believe that 20 years from now engineers will still stare into displays, run CAD tools, and archive their results in Power Point. But what will they do? My deepest fear is that the reality gap becomes so great that the best-selling software will be called Engineer-in-a-Box.
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ТЕКСТ 4
ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE
Does the future of robotics hold the promise of a dream come true to lighten the workload on humanity and provide companionship. Or the murder and mayhem of Hollywood movies?
When the Czech playwright Karel Capek sat down in 1920 to write a play about humanoid machines that turn against their creators, he decided to call his imaginary creations ‘robots’, from the Czech word for ‘slave labour’. Ever since then, our thinking about robots, whether fictional or real, has been dominated by the two key ideas in Capek's play. Firstly, robots are supposed to do the boring and difficult jobs that humans can’t do or don't want to do. Secondly, robots are potentially dangerous.
These two ideas remain influential, but not everyone accepts them. The first dissenting voice was that of the great Russian-American science-fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, who was born the same year that Capek wrote his notorious play. In 1940, barely two decades later, while others were still slavishly reworking Capek's narrative about nasty robots taking over the world, Asimov was already asking what practical steps humanity might take to avoid this fate. And instead of assuming that robots would be confined to boring and dangerous jobs, Asimov imaged a future in which robots care for our children, and strike up friendships with us.
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, it might seem that Capek was right and that Asimov was an idealistic dreamer. After all, most currentlyexisting robots are confined to doing nasty, boring and dangerous jobs, right? Wrong. According to the 2003 World Robotics Survey produced by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, over a third of all the robots in the world are designed not to spray-paint cars or mow the lawn, but simply to entertain humans. And the number is rising fast. It is quite possible, then, that the killer apt for robots will turn out to be not the slave labour envisaged by Capek, but the social companionship imagined by Asimov.
The most impressive entertainment robot currently on the market is undoubtedly the Aibo, a robotic dog produced by Sony. According to Qnroho.com, a website devoted to home and entertainment robotics, Aibo is the standard by which all other entertainment robots are measured. Special software allows each Aibo to learn and develop its own unique personality as it interacts with its owner. But at over a thousand pounds a shot, they aren't cheap.
Commercial products like the Aibo still have some way to go before they have the quasi-human capacities of 'Robbie', the child-caring robot envisaged by Asimov in one of his earliest short-stories, but the technology is moving fast. Scientists around the world are already beginning to develop the components for more advanced sociable robots, such as emotional recognition systems and emotional expression systems.
Emotions are vital to human interaction, so any robot that has to interact naturally with a human will need to be able to recognize human expressions of
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emotion and to express its own emotions in ways that humans can recognize. One of the pioneers in this area of research (which is known as 'affective computing’) is Cynthia Breazeal, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has built an emotionally-expressive humanoid head called Kismet, Kismet has moveable eyelids, eyes and lips which allow me to make a variety of emotional expressions. When left atone, Kismet looks sad, but when he detects a human face he smiles, inviting attention. If the carier moves too fast, a look of fear warns that something is wrong. Human parents who play with Kismet cannot help but respond sympathetically to these simple forms of emotional behavior.
Another emotionally-expressive robot called WE-4R has been built by Atsuo Takanishi and colleagues at Waseda University in Japan. Whereas Kismet is limited to facial expressions and head movements, WE-4R can also move its torso and wave its arms around to express its emotions.
The gap between science fiction and science fact is closing, and closing fast. In fact, the technology is advancing so quickly that some people are already worried about what will happen when robots become as emotional as we are. Will they turn against their creators, as Capek predicted? In the new Hollywood blockbuster, I, Robot (which is loosely based on an eponymous collection of Asimov's short stories), Will Smith plays a detective investigating the murder of a famous scientist. Despite the fail-safe mechanism built into the robots, which prevents them from harming humans, the detective suspects that the scientist was killed by a robot. His investigation leads him to discover an even more serious threat to the human race.
I, Robot is set in the year 2035, thirty one years in the future. To get an idea of how advanced robots will be by then, think about how far videogames have come in the last thirty one years. Back in 1973, the most advanced videogame was Pong, in which a white dot representing a tennis ball was batted back and forth across a black screen. The players moved the bats up and down by turning the knobs on the game console. By today's standards, the game was incredibly primitive. That's how today's robots will look to people in the year 2035.
Will those future people look back at the primitive robots of 2007 and wish they hadn’t advanced any further? If we want to avoid the nightmare scenario of a battle between humans and robots, we should start thinking about how to ensure that robots remain safe even when they are more intelligent. Isaac Asimov suggested that we could make sure robots don't become dangerous by programming them to follow the following ‘Three Robot Laws':
1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
At first blush, these three laws might seem like a good way to keep robots in their place. But to a roboticist they pose more problems than they solve. Asimov was well aware of this, and many of his short stories revolve around the contradictions and dilemmas implicit in the three laws.
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The sobering conclusion that emerges from these stories is that preventing intelligent robots from harming humans will require something much more complex than simply programming them to follow the three laws.
Note on the Author: Dr Dylan Evans teaches robotics at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
ТЕКСТ 5
THE BOLT THAT HOLDS THE IKEA EMPIRE TOGETHER
Ingvar Kamprad is no ordinary multi-billionaire. The founder of the Ikea furniture empire travels economy class, drives a 10-year-old Volvo and buys his fruit and vegetables in the afternoons, when prices are often cheaper. Ask him about the luxuries in his life and he says: ‘From time to time, I like to buy a nice shirt and cravat and eat Swedish caviar’.
Mr. Kamprad is one of Europe’s greatest post-war entrepreneurs. What began as a mail-order business in 1943 has grown into an international retailing phenomenon across 31 countries, with 70,000 employees.
Sales have risen every single year. The Ikea catalogue is the world’s biggest annual print run – an incredible 110m copies a year. And Mr. Kamprad has grown extraordinarily rich. He is worth $13.4bn and is the 17th richest person in the world, according to Forbes, the US magazine.
The concept behind Ikea’s amazing success is unbelievably simple: make affordable, well-designed furniture available to the masses. And then there is Mr. Kamprad himself – charismatic, humble, private. It is his ideas and values that are at the core of Ikea’s philosophy.
Best known for his extremely modest lifestyle, he washes plastic cups to recycle them. He has just left his long-standing Swedish barber because he found one in Switzerland, where he lives, who charges only SFr14 for a cut. ‘That’s a reasonable amount,’ he chuckles.
All Ikea executives are aware of the value of cost-consciousness. They are strongly discouraged from traveling first or business class. ‘There is no better form of leadership than setting a good example. I could never accept that I should travel first class while my colleagues sit in tourist class,’ Mr. Kamprad says.
As he walks around the group’s stores, he expresses the feeling of ‘togetherness’ physically, clasping and hugging his employees. This is very uncharacteristic of Sweden. ‘Call me Ingvar,’ he says to staff. The informality and lack of hierarchy are emphasized by his dress style, with an open-necked shirt preferred to a tie.
Mr. Kamprad has had both personal and business battles. He has fought against dyslexia and illness.
One of Mr. Kamprad’s characteristics is his obsessive attention to detail. When he visits his stores, he talks not only to the managers but also to floor staff and customers. A recent visit to six of the group’s Swedish stores has produced ‘100 details to discuss’, he says.
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