Text 4 baroque city

The medieval town was a combination of a camp, market and sanctuary. The necessity for protection led to the erection of walls separating the town from the country and allowing access only through guarded gates. The social functions of the medieval town were concentrated in a square. Medieval builders still have something to teach the twentieth - century architect who knows no way of achieving height except by erecting skyscrapers.

The Baroque city was formulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was actually built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Baroque plan the old medieval market square is transformed into the traffic circle which the pedestrian crosses at a great risk. The focus of the plan is no longer the church but the palace. In contrast with the medieval town, the Baroque city demands flat sites, straight continuous streets, and uniform building and roof lines. It was built for armies and wheeled vehicles.

The Baroque plan, unlike the medieval, left a deep imprint on later generations: it became standard throughout Western civilization. That imprint showed itself in a preference for straight streets over curved ones.

Text 5 town planning

The world is becoming more and more urban. The architect's functions now extent into town planning.

Town planning or urbanism is the preparation of plans for the regulated growth and improvement of towns, or the organization of land and buildings for group living. It is a cooperative process in which architects, economists, engineers, landscape architects, surveyors or topographers and other specialists take part. In town planning there are different street patterns: gridiron, radial, ring and functional (or organic). According to the International Union of Architects at present there are 800,000 fully qualified architects in the world. In the highly developed countries there is one it per 2 or 3 thousand people. In the developing countries there is only one architect per 500, 000 or one million people.

The architects' sphere of knowledge is constantly expanding. He has to combine art, advanced technology, science and economics in his work. The main problem facing architect today is to avoid any conflict with nature and the landmarks of by-gone. Nowadays we must think about the architecture of the 21^st century.

Our cities are growing and their appearance is changing. New kinds of buildings are rising, with more amenities for the people. The town of the future is already appearing today. It should be a convenient, beautiful and well planned town. The designers are known to take into consideration such methods as advantageous sitting of industrial undertakings and residential areas, the laying out of highways, the organization of transport, the creation of centers and green belts, etc.

Text 6 ernest rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand where he lived up to 1859. At the age of 19 after finishing school he entered the only New Zealand University founded in 1870. At that time there were only 150 students and 7 professors there. At the University Ernest took great interest in physics and developed a magnetic detector of radio waves. However, he was absolutely uninterested in the practical applications of his discoveries.

In 1895 Rutherford went to Cambridge where he continued research under Thomson, the outstanding English physicist. There Rutherford studied the processes of ionization in gases and took great interest in radioactivity opened by Becquerel, a world-known French physicist. About ten years Ernest Rutherford lived and worked in Canada. Later he lectured in leading universities in the USA and England from 1907 till 1919.

Rutherford famous work "The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles of Matter and the Structure of the Atom" dealt with so-called "atom models". All main Rutherford's works deal with the nuclear atom. The splitting of the atom has opened to man a new and enormous source of energy. The most important results have been obtained by splitting the atom of uranium.

For working out the theory of radioactive disintegration of elements, for determining the nature of alpha particles, for developing the nuclear atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

He died in 1937 at the age of 66.