Модульна контрольна робота №2

з практичного курсу перекладу

для студентів 5 курсу, групи ______

факультету перекладачів

Варіант 3

Task 1. Comment on lexical specifics of translating popular scientific texts.

Task 2. Summarise the article into Ukrainian. Write at least 200-250 words.

Shocking power

Feb 25th 2009 From Economist.com

How to make use of a rough ride to generate electricity

BUMPS in the road are never good, but every cloud has its silver lining. In the case of an uneven road surface that lining may be a novel way of generating electricity for vehicles travelling over it.

The idea of using a car’s shock absorbers to create power in this way emerged when a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were looking at regenerative brakes in hybrid petrol-electric vehicles. When the driver hits the brakes in a non-hybrid, the kinetic energy of the car is transformed, via friction between the brake blocks and the discs, into heat, which is lost. Hybrid vehicles avoid that loss by using the electric motors that drive the wheels as brakes as well. In braking mode the wheels turn the motor (which thus becomes a generator) rather than the other way round. Instead of being converted into heat, the kinetic energy becomes electrical energy. The car still slows down, and the electricity can either be used immediately to power the vehicle’s electrical systems, or it can be stored in a battery for later consumption.

Shakeel Avadhany, one of the students in question, reasoned that a similar idea could be applied to vehicle shock absorbers. These use a series of springs, torsion bars and pistons to smooth out the effects of bumps and pot-holes and thus stop riders from being bounced around. As with conventional disc brakes, the energy involved is dispersed as heat. Mr Avadhany and his colleagues, who have formed a company called Levant Power to exploit their idea, hope to change that.

To explore the possibilities, they attached sensors to the shock absorbers of a variety of vehicles and drove them around on roads with a range of surfaces, from smooth to potholed. In the worst case, of class 8 semi-trailer trucks (big, articulated lorries, to British readers), they found that roughly six kilowatts was being lost as heat. To try to recover that power, they have designed a hydraulic system that, on encountering a bump in the road, forces fluid into a miniature turbine attached to a generator. Now they are experimenting with it. They first installed their device, called GenShock, on a Humvee—a military vehicle that travels ten miles per American gallon (about 4¼ kilometres per litre). They found that the recovered power of four kilowatts improved fuel-efficiency by up to 10% because that electricity took the place of current that would otherwise have been drawn from the engine using the alternator.

Levant’s first target is the military market. America’s defence department is about to hand out $40 billion for the development of a new light tactical vehicle, and Mr Avadhany hopes the firm’s system will be part of such a vehicle. If that works, then civilian applications beckon, and local authorities will have yet another excuse not to fix the roads.

Task 3. Write the annotation of the article in English. Use up to 100 words.