Vocabulary notes

Task 1. Learn the following words. Translate the sentences.

1. pollution – забруднення. Noise pollution is a growing threat to our health.

2. evident – очевидний, явний. It is evident that he was young.

3. reach – досягати. Everyone wants to reach a place comfortably and fast.

4. tremendous – величезний. It took the steam engine more than a century to develop its tremendous capacity to the full.

5. to suffer – страждати. He didn’t suffer much in the accident.

6. however – проте, однак. It’s raining hard. However, I think we should go out.

7. use – застосування. To prepare metals for practical use requires much knowledge and experience.

8. to eliminate – усувати, знищувати. Some people were eliminated from the competition.

9. considerable – значний. We had considerable difficulty in finding the house.

10. purpose – мета. This tool can be used for various purposes.

11. scale – масштаб. The machine system made it possible to include science in production on a large scale.

12. success – успіх. I tried to get in, but without success.

13. to carry out – виконати. He carried out his promise.

14. at present – тепер. At present we cannot take part in carrying out this experiment.

15. to determine – визначати. Atomic weights of 9 elements were wrongly determined.

16. growth – ріст. The population growth greatly enlarged the movement of passengers in big cities.

17. to increase – зростати, збільшувати. Decreasing gas volume we increase pressure.

18. to bring about – викликати, бути причиною. The discovery and use of electricity brought about the industrial revolution.

19. essential – істотний. We can live without clothes, but food and drink are essential to life.

20. environment – навколишнє середовище. All countries have to protect the environment on their own territory and in their own space.

21. to solve – вирішувати. The most promising way to solve the problem of clean air is to improve technology.

22. therefore – тому, отже. We don’t have enough money. Therefore we cannot buy a new car.

23. necessary – необхідний, потрібний. I’ll come back if necessary.

23. datum (pl. data) – дана величина (дані). We keep the data in a computer data bank.

24. joint – спільний, з’єднаний. Joint efforts of all countries can solve the problem of environmental protection.

25. to deal with … – мати справу з … These articles deal with the investigations and achievements of world science in the field of radioactivity.

26. confident – упевнений. The government is confident of winning the next election.

27. achieve – досягати. He will never achieve anything if he doesn’t work.

28. to purify – очищати. Many operations are used to purify water.

28. soil – грунт, земля. A layer of soil formed in the course of 100 or 200 years may be destroyed in a few days of heavy rain or dust storms.

29. circumstances – обставини, умови. We can judge what he did till we know all circumstances.

Task II. Read and translate the text.

Text 5 A

Environmental Protection must be Global

That the problem of pollution and ecology has become the most important one for mankind is evident to all. The more civilization is developing, the greater the ecological problems are becoming. Air and water pollution by industry is now reaching tremendous proportions. In our era it is changing from a national to an international problem, especially in territories where rivers cross several countries. The seas and oceans are also becoming seriously polluted. A similar situation is developing in the atmosphere. It is known that many cities throughout the world suffer from air pollution.

However, our scientific knowledge and technological advancement make it possible to eliminate it if people use good will and make considerable investments for that purpose. The development of natural resources on a global scale is already possible from a scientific and technical standpoint. Large-scale experimental work in this area is successfully being carried out.

At present scientists in industrially developed counties are working on the theory of interaction of all the atmospheric and oceanic global processes that determine the climate and weather of the world. Increasing growth of population, industrialization and the use of resources are slowly but surely changing the global climate and water balance. This can be described as a great experiment, one that may bring about changes in the environment more serious than ever before.

The essential feature in the environment protection is that many problems can be solved only on the level of world community. Therefore, the planning of protection against pollution by human society as a whole is imperative today and in the near future. It is necessary to develop an international program to study data on land, forest, atmospheric and oceanic resources, both renewable and non-renewable. It is the joint efforts of many scientists and special public organizations that can deal with the problem and take necessary measures to protect environment.

It is still a big job and much remains to be done. However, scientists are confident that planned actions of all countries can eliminate pollution and achieve successes in purifying air, water and soil and in safeguarding natural resources. At the same time one must realize that social and political circumstances may stand in the way of further progress in this field.

Exercise 12. Answer the following questions on the text:

1. What is this text about? 2. How do water and air become polluted? 4. Why is the problem of water pollution becoming a global problem? 5. What are the ways of eliminating this problem?

Exercise 13. Translate the following clusters of words into Ukrainian and state their part of speech.

Pollute – pollution, evident – evidence, ecology – ecological, nation – national, especial – especially, serious – seriously, science – scientific, technology – technological, advance – advancement, eliminate – elimination, invest – investment, develop – development, nature – natural, experiment – experimental, success – successful – successfully, interact – interaction, atmosphere – atmospheric, ocean – oceanic, globe – global, sure – surely, protect – protection, new – renew – renewable – non-renewable, organize – organization, pure – purify.

Exercise 14. Translate the following word-combinations.

Air and water pollution; tremendous proportion; several countries; polluted seas and oceans; similar situation; throughout the world; technological advancement; good will; considerable investments; on a global scale; scientific and technical standpoint; developed countries; interaction of all processes; growth of population; water balance; use of resources; to bring about changes; essential feature; world community; renewable and non-renewable resources; joint efforts; to take necessary measures; to eliminate pollution; to achieve success; safeguarding natural resources; social and political circumstances.

Exercise 15. Form questions to which the following are answers. Begin your questions with the words given in brackets.

1. Water and air are becoming more and more polluted. (What …?) 2. There are government and public organizations that are analysing data on land, forest and air. (What … ?) 4. The situation at the Sea of Azov is remaining very serious. (Where … ?) 5. At present scientists are working on the theory of interaction of all the atmospheric and oceanic global processes. (What … on?)

Exercise 16. Translate the sentences into Ukrainian paying atten-tion to the active vocabulary of the text.

1. All-round automation determines the social consequences of the scientific-technological progress. 2. Transport is one of the main offenders in noise pollution. 3. Atomic energy must be used for peaceful purposes. 4. Only a strictly scientific approach to the industrial-technological development can solve ecological problems. 5. As the planet’s natural resources diminish, and a growing world population increases demands on those resources, competition for access to them will escalate. 6. Recent scientific research proved data that the protective layer of ozone around our planet is under severe attack. 7. Machine tillage of the soil affects its natural fertility. 8. Wars and preparations for them, such as tests of new types of armament, are having a tremendous destructive effect on the natural environment. 9. The use of nuclear weapons in a large scale war destroy vegetation and erode soil over vast territories. 10. The Sea of Azov suffers greatly from serious and chronic coastal water pollution. 11. Considerable improvements should be introduced into motor transportation operation to eliminate air pollution. 12. It’s very difficult and very costly to purify every hour hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of air containing compounds of lead and mercury. 13. Human progress has reached the stage of intensive exploration of nuclear and solar energy, the World Ocean and outer space. 14. It is evident now, however, that often man is adversely affecting the environment.

Task III. Read and translate the text.

Text 5B. Killer rain

What is acid rain? To answer this question we need to go back about three decades. In the 1960s, people in Sweden were alarmed to discover that the fish in their West Coast lakes were dying. There were no apparent reasons for this – no poison in the water, for example. The lakes were still clear and fresh.

When the scientists did their tests, however, they found that the lake water was much more acid than is normal. Some lakes, in fact, were a hundred times more acid than had been in the 1930s.

And the cause for this? It was the rain. Instead of being clean pure water, it had become contaminated by industrial processes and was now very acidic. When it fell on parts of Sweden where the soil was already acidic, the result was that acid water poured into Sweden’s lakes. This eventually killed the fish, and caused a good deal of other problems which are still being discovered.

To understand how the process works, imagine a factory in Britain. It needs heat for its manufacturing, so it burns oil. This has a high sulphur content, which turns into Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) after the oil burnt, and goes up the factory chimney into the air.

The SO2 can travel for hundreds of thousands of kilometres, depending on the wind. The longer it is in the air, the more chance there is of it oxidizing – combining with oxygen – to form sulphuric acid. The acid becomes a cloud, and eventually falls to earth as rain. This rain contains sulphate (SO4) which has been produced by the sulphuric acid.

If there was only one factory doing this, there would be no problem. Europe, however, is such an industrialized area that it sends about 20 million tones of sulphur into the air every year.

There is an old saying in English: “What goes up, must come down”. This 20 million tones is picked up by the wind. Some lands in the streets around the factory, but most of it is carried some distance, often to another country. Each nation in Europe produces hundreds of thousands of tons of poison each year, and then sends it abroad.

Obviously, all this sulphur must have an effect on the environment.

Take Sweden, for example. This country is in an unfortunate position, because of the direction of the winds across Europe, and because of the fact that large sections of its soil are already acidic.

Every day, Sweden receives more than 1,000 tonnes of sulphur from the air, most of it from other countries. This has been dropping on Swedish soil for the last forty years, and the result is horrific. 18,000 of the country’s 85,000 lakes are now acidified: 4,000 have no fish left and about another 6,000 have been seriously damaged.

The result can be seen in other countries, too. Germany suffers an estimated $800 million loss a year from lost trees – killed by acid rain – and another $600 million a year in damage to crops and agriculture. Approximately 1 million hectares in Central Europe have been affected.

As more countries become more heavily industrialized, then the amount of coal and oil that is burnt will increase. At the moment, the world sends between 75 and 100 million tons of sulphur into the air each year. Some scientists have estimated that, by the year 2100, this figure will have grown to 700 million tons.

Currently, the problem occurs in Europe, Scandinavia, Usa and states of the former USSR; but it is expected to appear soon in Brasil, Nigeria, Southern Africa, India, and South-East Asia. And there is another problem: it has recently been discovered that large sections of the Arctic are covered during the spring and winter by a sulphurous haze – and no one knows yet what the effects of this will be.

The problem of acidification started in the early 1950s, so after only forty years we have caused a huge amount of environmental damage. There are a few short-term ways of correcting the acidification damage, but they are not permanent solutions. In the long term, we will have to find a way of getting the sulphur out of our oil and coal. It is possible to do this, either by treating the fuel before it is burnt, or by cleaning the smoke which comes out of the factory chimney.

The problem, however, is that both processes are expensive, and the countries which are the worst offenders (for example, the USA and the UK) are frightened of the amount of money they would have to spend. In the USA, for example, a sulphur cleaning scheme would cost between $2,500,000,00 and $4,000,000,000 per year.

Eventually, something will have to be done. Acid rain has been described as a “catastrophe of a leisurely kind, trouble building up a shower at a time”. The catastrophe is getting less leisurely every year. Either we spend money now, and sort the problem out, or we spend a lot more in the future, when the ecology becomes completely overloaded, and a disaster occurs.