12 (#19) The Writer and Painter, the Musician____________________

♦ Pushkin is the most important Russian writer of all time, like Shakespeare in England or Dante in Italy. Pushkin provided the standards for Russian arts and literature in 19th century.

Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799 into an upper-class family. In 1811 he entered a lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo. The education offered at the lyceum shaped Pushkin's life.

Pushkin was Russia's greatest poet. In his works he was first influenced by 18th century poets, and then by Lord Byron. Finally he developed his own style, which was realistic but classical in form. This writer, called by many "the sun of Russian literature", belongs among the foremost poets and writers of the world.

♦ William Somerset Maugham is one of the best known English writers of the 20th century. He was not only a novelist, but also a one of the most successful dramatist and short-story writers. He was born in Paris in 1874. His parents died when he was very little and the boy was brought up by his uncle, clergyman. After his parents death the boy was taken away from the French school which he had attended, and went for his lessons daily to the apartment of the English clergyman at the church . At the age of ten the boy was sent to England to attend school. In 1890 he went abroad and studied at the University of Heidelberg from which he returned to England in 1892 and as his parents had destined him for the medical profession, he became a medical student at St Thomas.s hospital in London. His experience in treating the sick gave Maugham material for his first work Lisa of Lambeth(1897). After that, although he became a fully ualified

doctor, Somerset decided to devote his life to literature. .I didn.t want to be a doctor. I didn.t want to be anything but a writer.. Soon after the publication of his first novel Maugham went to Spain and travelled widely to all parts of the world. He visited Russia, America, Africa, Asia. The technique of the short story had always interested Maugham. DeMaupassant and Chekhov influenced him but he developed a form of a story that has unmistakable Maugham.s flavor.

Somerset Maugham has written 24 plays, 19 novels and a large number of short stories. The most mature period of his life began in 1915, when he published one of his most popular novels, Of human Bondage. Maugham wants the readers to draw his own conclusion about the characters and events described in his novels. The other most prominent works by Somerset Maugham are: Cakes and Ale(1930), Theatre(1937), and The Razor.s Edge(1944). Realistic portrayal of life, keen character observation, and interesting plots coupled with beautiful, expressive language, simple and lucid style, place Somerset Maugham on a level with the greatest English writers of the 20th century

♦ Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath: scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer.

He was born and raised near Vinci, Italy, the illegitimate son of a notary, Messer Piero, and a peasant woman, Caterina. He had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci". His full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, son of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci."

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupy unique positions as the most famous, the most illustrated and most imitated portrait and religious painting of all time. Their fame is approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also iconic.

As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing a helicopter, a tank, the use of concentrated solar power, a calculator, a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics, the double hull, and many others. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were feasible during his lifetime. Some of his smaller inventions such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire entered the world of manufacturing unheralded.

He greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and the study of water. Of his works, perhaps 15 paintings survive, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and notes.

♦ Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech Marquis of Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), popularly known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish artist and one of the most important painters of the 20th century. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking, bizarre, and beautiful images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was released posthumously in 2003. Born in Catalonia, Spain, Dalí insisted on his "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in 711, and attributed to these origins, "my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes."

Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for doing unusual things to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork. The purposefully sought notoriety led to broad public recognition and many purchases of his works by people from all walks of life.

♦ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. His output of over 600 compositions includes works widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of European composers and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest composers of classical music.

13 (#20) Science and Technology_____________________________

♦ Modern technology is rapidly spreading all over the earth. Scientists, researchers, engineers and designers are eager to emulate the material achievements and living standards of the industrially advanced countries. One can hardly imagine our present day life without such trivial gadgets as can-openers, food processors, air conditioners or vacuum cleaners. Every office is equipped with a PC, an answer-phone, a fax machine and a photocopier. Every teenager is able to use a remote control unit, a video recorder, a camera or a Walkman.

I'm absolutely sure that all these things make our life more exciting, save a lot of time and help to avoid health problems. For example, most of my friends have a microwave in the kitchen. We use it almost every day without realizing how considerably it revolutionized the way food is cooked both at home and within food industry. Although it met with the disapproval of many top chefs, when invented, it is becoming an increasingly common sight in many restaurant kitchens. Its greatest advantage is a huge reduction of time needed to prepare a dish. Secondly, it's easy to clean and high temperatures minimize the risk of infection. It's also a great time-saver for those who don't wish to waste their time sweating over a hot cooker or use cancer causing fats when flying.

When Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University invented the first calculating machine in 1812 he could hardly have imagined the situation we find ourselves today. In fact, the PCs are being used in almost every field today for the simple reason that they are more efficient than human beings, doing 500,000 sums in a fraction of a second. They can pay wages, reserve seats on planes, control sputniks in space, work out tomorrow's weather, play chess and compose music. They even help police fight crime, saving the detective from checking the information, identifying the fingerprints or making a photo robot. It's needless to say that speed there is very essential.

Moreover, scientists predict that virtual reality will soon be a part and parcel of life. This amazing thing allows us to experience another dimensions. It is not quite as immediate as the real world, but it is startling and experts say that in a few years every home will be using a VR set. I must say that it is already used in Japan to sell kitchens. Instead of renting huge displays, companies can do with one small office. VR goggles and gloves allow the customers to build their own kitchen from thousands of options. In fact there are countless applications for VR. Say, children will be taken to visit castles of the past and medical students will be able to practice without using real people.

♦ To answer the question whether science does us good or does it brings disaster isn’t a simple task. We should take into consideration many facts. On the one hand a lot of outstanding discoveries made the life of the people more comfortable and pleasant. Without scientific discoveries and inventions no progress would be possible. Thanks to discovery of electricity we can listen to the radio, watch TV, see films, people learned how to produce steel and metal alloys – now we use railways and airplanes.

Development of chemistry led to new synthetic fibers and people got more clothing and food. People learned to use scientific achievements in curing incurable earlier diseases.

But on the other hand such outstanding discoveries of the 20th century as atom fission led to creation of the weapons of mass destruction. We should say that science has a potential for both good and evil.

Alfred Nobel invented a new explosive (dynamite) to improve the peacetime industries of road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men.

He was born in Stockholm on October 21st 1833, but moved to Russia with his parents in1842. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred began his own study of explosives in his father’s laboratory. He had never been to school or university, but had studied privately and by the time he was 20 was a skillful chemist and excellent linguist, speaking Russian, English, German, French and Swedish. He was very imaginative and inventive.

His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to wars, and thus between nations, and he spent much time and money working for this cause, until his death in 1896. His famous will in which he left money to provide prizes for outstanding discoveries in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals.

Medical men use laser to cure and investigate diseases and the same time laser can be used for destruction.

Achievements of biology and chemistry are also used to cause damage to people.

All this shows that science can take good forms and evil forms. What form does it take depends on the way people work with science. It is impossible to stop progress, to stop people to investigate and explore the world. But people should care it wouldn’t be led in wrong direction.

Scientists need you thinking in a new much broader way than before. In this respect the education and cultural level are of great importance. They have to influence politicians, warn them of possible effects of using new discoveries. Scientists and politicians think that it’s their responsibility for not using scientific developments to cause damage and destruction. There is a lot of work to be done in this direction.

#3 Earth Has Lost Two-thirds of Its Forests______________________

♦ Despite Earth Summits, television documentaries and all the public awareness of deforestation, woodlands are being cut down, burned and turned into farmland or scrub at an ever increasing rate with an area the size of England and Wales disappearing each year.

Two-thirds of the world's forests have been lost forever. In one generation we are facing the almost complete loss of natural forest.

The new figures are far worse than previously thought and the Asia Pacific region, where fires are raging in In donesia had lost 88 per cent of its forest cover even before the current disaster. Only two per cent of the world's forests are protected. At least 10 per cent of each forest type need to be saved to have any hope of preventing mass destruction of species that live there.

For some countries like the UK it is too late with 97 per cent already destroyed But even here woodland is still being lost.

The burning of forests, brush and pasture in the Amazon in 1997 was worse than ever. The government estimate for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was 15,000 square kilometres a year, an area nearly as large as Wales - but that dates back as to 1994.

The disturbing figures are based on what scientists believe would have been world forest cover 8,000 years ago, before man started to clear them for agriculture. 81 million square kilometres existed 8,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, covering just over 60 per cent of the earth's land surface if ice-covered Greenland and Antarctica are excluded. Today that has fallen to just over 30 million square kilometres.

Apart from the extinction of species caused by the loss of forests, the local climate is altered. In the case of the Indonesian fires the smog problem is replaced by others when the rains come. Soil and ash are washed into rivers clogging them, killing the fish and causing flooding. In Brazil people regularly suffer flooding because there are no trees to soak up the water.

The forests are disappearing to provide pasture, plantations and cropland although sometimes the cleared land is .only to be used for a few years before its fertility collapses, and scrub invades, and the ranchers move on to new forest areas. This is what happened in Britain, which was mostly covered in forest, over the past 4,000 years.

Apart from wiping out literally millions of plant and animal species, the forest loss is altering local climates, hastening water run off and even damaging sea fisheries and reefs as salt is washed rapidly off the land. Forest burning also produces much of the extra carbon dioxide which is pouring into the atmosphere, threatening global

warming.

The destruction of forests is a worldwide phenomenon and Europe and particularly

the UK are among the worst offenders.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) wants ten per cent of each different type of forest, in each country, around the globe to be given permanent protection.

#5 A Time-bomb in the Earth's Atmosphere______________________

♦ Ground and satellite readings confirm a decline in global ozone: the stratospheric ozone shield that protects life from damaging ultraviolet radiation is being rapidly depleted. The depletion of the ozone layer is an immediate global environmental problem threatening the survival and development of humanity.

Industrial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), widely used as refrigerants in auto air-conditioning, halons, used as fire retardants, aerosol propellants and solvents, foam-blowing agents and others which destroy the ozone layer allow harmful ultraviolet rays to enter the atmosphere, damaging plant and animal life. These chemicals also contribute to global warming. Created and used by man for industrial and commercial purposes, the chemicals appear to be the sole cause for this destructive effect

Destruction of the ozone layer may be compared to the effect of a bomb that has been primed: its timing mechanism is counting off days, hours and minutes up to the "explosion", which could threaten all civilization with disaster. And the. cause of the disaster, if it happens, will not be atomic or hydrogen bombs or laser weapons - it will be nothing more exotic than the ordinary everyday deodorant can and refrigeration systems using CFCs.

When they were first synthesised over 60 years ago, these chemicals were the pride and joy of the chemists who invented them: they were harmless, non-toxic and cheap to produce. Now they are called "killers".

Each one percent drop in ozone is thought to allow a 2 to 3 percent rise in the ultraviolet light reaching Earth. Any large increase would be reason for serious concern. The light is destructive to DNA, the hereditary material, and to proteins.

The most dramatic evidence of damage to the global ozone shield appears each spring in the polar regions. The continent-wide hole over the Antarctica was first detected by British researches in 1982. A retrospective examination of satellite data reveals that the hole was virtually undetectable prior to 1979. In 1987, a 50 percent reduction in ozone was measured during October. In January 1989, a major international research effort confirmed that conditions similar but less severe than those found in the south polar atmosphere prevailed over the Arctic. The chemistry resembled that found over the Antarctica. As the Antarctic ozone hole dissipates each summer, great masses of ozone-deficient air have spread as far as New Zealand, Australia, and southern Argentina and Chile, resulting in significantly higher radiation exposure for the populations of these nations. In addition, ozone levels over midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere are decreasing. The average levels of ozone in the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere appear to have decreased by about three per cent.

High concentrations of chlorine and bromine occur where ozone depletion is the most severe. Some scientists conclude that the sudden onset of the ozone hole was triggered when chlorine levels exceeded two parts for billion. This is an example of how sensitive the earth's atmosphere is to man-made chemical effects.

Even if the production and use ,of ozone-depleting substances is stopped immediately, the chemicals already released will continue to accelerate ozone depletion for ten years. It will require nearly three centuries for the ozone hole to fully heal.

The increased ground-level intensity of ultraviolet radiation that accompanies stratospheric ozone depletion is linked in a way to increases in skin cancer, cataracts and change in the immune system in humans.

We do know enough now to recognise that the continued release of CFCs, halons and other chemicals put all of the earth's human and natural environment at risk. The threat to plant and animal life has direct consequences for humans. Commercially important fish and shrimp species, for example, have been shown to suffer mortality rates when exposed to increases in ultraviolet radiation. These findings are truly alarming.

Ecologists call for a complete, worldwide phaseout of CFCs and halons, for restrictions on other related gases that contribute to ozone depletion.

How can the transition to a total phaseout be managed? To begin with, approximately one-third of CFCs presently in use can be substituted by CFCs which decay more rapidly and present less threat to the atmosphere; one-third of CFCs can be contained and reused through recycling processes; and one-third of present uses can be phased out by the introduction of non-CFC technologies.

#18 Global Climate Change__________________________________

♦ Global interdependence is nowhere as clear and inescapable as in our shared environment* There is a universal recognition that the world's environment is under attack, the environment has been severely damaged. All human beings are directly affected.

The increase in human population and economic activity is producing a dramatic buildup in CO2 and other substances that trap the sun's heat inside the atmosphere, resulting in a sharp rise in the earth's temperature.

Of all the environmental problems, global climate change is in many ways the most threatening and intractable. The linkage between mankind's economic activities and climate change is quite clear nowadays. Climate change is closely connected with radical changes taking place in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The cpmbustion of fossil fuels is a principal source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2), which is accumulating in the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Carbon dioxide levels are now 25 per cent higher than they were in preindustrial times. Other heat-trapping gases, such as chlorof luorocarbons and methane, are also released into the atmosphere at a growing rate.

The research carried out by Russian scientists in Antarctica jointly with French collegues has revealed the strong correlation between high concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere and warm interglacial climate regimes. What is especially alarming in these Russian-French findings is that current levels of both of these heat-trapping gases are higher than they have ever been in the past 160,000 years and are rising.