2. Answer the questions.

1. What scientific achievements are expected in the twentieth century?

2. Why is it said that virtual reality becomes more vivid?

3. What can defy any attempt at concise categorisation?

4. Thanks to what facts can the scientists transform bits and pieces of the most fundamental facets of our life?

5. What can you say about muscle vaccine?

3. Find the word in the text which means the same as the following.

1. prevent

2. interpretation

3. attempt

4. Match the following adjectives with corresponding nouns. Make up as many word combinations as possible and translate them.

Model: artificial environment

1. important a) facet

2. fundamental b) achievement

3. medical c) embryo

4. cultural d) environment

5. demographic e) shift

6. human f) problem

7. technological g) gene

8. artificial h) process

9. scientific i) product

10. natural j) capability

11. versatile k) movement

5. Using the facts from the text complete the table.

Name of the scientist	Technology or advance that is researched by this scientist
1.
2.
3.
4.

IV. Speaking

Discuss with a partner what achievements of biotechnology do you know?

Unit 6

Biological computing facility

I. Warm up

Read and translate the following quotation.

Plans to clone human embryos to generate vital stem cells for transplant operations are likely to fail using the techniques currently available.

(Steve Connor)

What is your opinion about this?

II. Vocabulary focus

1. Useful words for learning.

tiny - очень маленький, крошечный

overview - обзор, просмотр

human cell - человеческая клетка

microprocessor - микропроцессор

mitochondria - митохондрия

level - уровень

chromosome - хромосома

available - доступный

to upgrade - заменять

significant - важный, существенный

to compare - сравнивать

2. Don’t miss the chance to enrich your vocabulary!

Match each component in Column 1 with equivalent from Column 2.

1. blood cell a) бесклеточный

2. egg cell b) клетка-мутант

3. germ cell c) клеточная биология

4. nerve cell d) клеточная мембрана

5. cell biology e) клеточная популяция

6. cell membrane f) клон клеток

7. cell population g) колонии клеток, происходящие от одной клетки

8. cell line h) кровяная клетка

9. cell clone i) нервная клетка

10. cell-free j) эмбрион

11. cell-mutant k) яйцеклетка

III. Reading

Read the text and translate it into Russian.

What I think would be real interesting today is if we take a tour of a biological computing facility. Now, you have to use a little imagination on this tour. I’ll be the tour guide. I want you all to imagine that you are computer engineers, and my job as a tour guide is to translate for you the biological names that we’re viewing so you will understand them as computer engineers. Now you have to imagine yourself as being quite small, like, maybe one micron tall, because biological things are really tiny. So I want to look inside a biological cell and try to identify those computing things which we can relate to our computers today with the name translations. Let’s start with an overview. And let’s take a human cell, because that’s what we’re studying most these days. Specifically, we’re going to look at a human cell from the standpoint of how does it compute. For the overview, when we look in the cell, the first thing we see is a big DRAM memory in the nucleus. It’s called DNA. Then we look around the cell, and we see there are several thousand microprocessors. They are called mitochondria. And if we look further at how they work, they all share a common memory and they have two levels of cache. Now, you may not believe all this, but wait till we get into the details. Let's look first at the big DRAM memory. Well, it’s packaged in 48 bags. These are called chromosomes. Now, as we look at those we are a little puzzled because there are some little ones and some big ones and some middle-sized ones, and how did that happen? Well, when you think about it, this computing facility started with a very small memory, and it’s been upgraded a number of times, and you know when you go to the store you’d like to get the biggest DRAM parts, but you have to go with what’s available. And that’s what happened with the biological system. It had to go with what was available at the time it was upgraded. If we look further into the big DRAM memory, we see that probably the packaging isn’t important. Forty-eight banks probably aren’t significant. We can view the whole memory as one string of bits, a one-dimensional memory. And biologists, I think, agree with that today. And so how big is it? Well, it’s six gigabytes. Now, that’s not so bad compared to a personal computer memory today. That’s nice compared to even most workstations today. Keeping in mind that it is only one cell, this is a really big DRAM memory.

Notes:

nucleus

1. ядро, центр.

Syn: core, seed, nub, heart, kernel, centre, pith.

2. атомное ядро; ядро кометы, туманности, галактики:

galactic nucleus – ядро галактики

cometary nucleus / nucleus of comet – ядро кометы

3. ядро клетки; ядро центральной нервной системы:

germ nucleus – ядро зародыша

4. зародыш