Text 4 plants and their uses

Plants are special living things: they accumulate sunlight and make organic matter from inorganic one in their leaves. They give off oxygen into the air during this process. Plants play a very important part in conservation and protection of soil, water and animals. They protect soil from the wind and keep water in the soil.

From earliest times plants are known to play an important part in everyday life of a man. We know plants to provide us with food, clothing, shelter and many other necessary things. People are still as dependent upon plants as primitive man was many thousand years ago. Great necessity caused primitive man to grow plants. And the cultivation of plants is thought to be closely connected with man’s progress. In order to grow plants man had to settle down and to begin building homes. Primitive people had few needs except food and clothing.

Civilization has increased man’s wants to a great extent. The man of today is no longer satisfied with merely having food to eat and house to live in. He wants raw materials to make useful things and products.

Man’s food and clothing are produced directly or indirectly by plants. Many animals feed on plants and produce food and raw materials to be used by man. Without plants neither animals nor men will be able to live. Many things people use in everyday life are made from plants. The paper they write on, the clothes they wear, the tables they sit at, all come from plants. Plants are used as timber in furniture making an as fuel in house heating. Many drugs used in medicine are also made from plants.

Words to remember:

1. to accumulate – накапливать

2. conservation – сохранение

3. protection – защита

4. to provide – обеспечивать

5. to grow – расти

6. to connect – связывать, соединять

7. to settle down – поселиться, обосноваться

8. raw – сырой. необработанный

9. useful – полезный

10. fuel – топливо

11. furniture – мебель

12. heating – обогрев

13. drug – лекарство

Exercise 1. Answer the questions:

1. What caused primitive people to grow plants?

2. Why are plants important for animals?

3. What do we need raw materials for?

4. What can be made from plants?

5. Are people still dependent upon plants?

Exercise 2. Choose the proper word. Read and translate the sentence.

1. Plants are part of (animals, nature, sunlight).

2. Plants keep (oxygen, food, water) in the soil.

3. Primitive people have to grow plants to get (shelter, oxygen, soil).

4. The cultivation of plants is closely connected with (conservation, progress, building).

5. People need raw materials to make (everyday life, great necessity, useful things).

6. Plants (provide, protect, produce) people with food and clothing.

Exercise 3. Read, translate and learn the following sayings.

1. The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. (Galileo)

2. To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. (Helen Keller)

3. Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into. (Henry Ward Beecher)

4. Choose only one master - Nature. (Rembrandt)

5. Nature is the art of God. (Dante Alighieri)