The answer is blowing in the windWind power is an alternative energy source which has been used for many years in countries like Holland and Denmark. In fact, today it is the world’s fastest-growing source of energy. Strangely enough, even though it is one of the windiest countries in Europe, Britain has been slow to take advantage of wind power. The strong winds which blow around Britain’s coastline could easily be used to provide us with all our energy needs. All we need to do now is set up some wind farms. Wind farms are actually arrays of electricity- generating wind turbines, which are tall, slim towers with two or three rotor blades at the top. The wind turns the blades which spin a pole. This pole is connected to a generator, where the electricity is made. There can be as few as one and as many as thousands of wind turbines in a single array. Computers monitor the wind direction and speed, and can shut down the turbines if the wind becomes too strong. What is more, wind turbines make hardly any noise and they are not unpleasant to look at, certainly not as ugly as nuclear power stations! Although wind farms do take up a lot of space, they are often located on unoccupied sites or in areas that can also be used for farming. Building wind farms at sea is also possible. In fact, stronger winds generated at sea make offshore wind farms a practical alternative. Offshore wind farms also mean that much larger turbines can be built, without objections from the public. A single wind turbine can produce enough electricity to power 375 homes and these wind farms are already making a small but significant difference. At the moment there are only around sixty wind farms in Britain both on land and offshore. As this number increases, we may well see wind power supplying, as much as 10% of world’s electricity demands and up to 20% of Britain’s total. TEXT #22 1. Read and translate the text 2. Vocabulary exercises 3. Grammar exercises 4. Speaking tasks A dream come true At the age of 16, Alexander started to help teach young deaf mutes; children who could not hear or speak. He used his father’s system of ‘visible speech’ and achieved amazing results. A few years later, while working in London, Alexander met two men who would play an important role in his life. Mr Alexander Ellis, a professor of philology, and Sir Charles Wheatstone, an expert in telegraphy, started him thinking about sending sounds through a machine. Unfortunately, it was around this time that the fatal disease called the white plague spread through Britain and both Alexander’s brothers died, so Alexander and his parents moved to Canada. The Boston Board of Education asked him to come and work in the USA at a new school for deaf mutes. Alexander was very happy to move to Boston and continue the work he had started in Britain. He became so successful that he soon opened his own school called “The School of Vocal Physiology”. Then two years later, he agreed to give private lessons to a young boy whose family allowed him to use their basement as a workshop. This gave Alexander the opportunity to resume his experiments with sound transmitters. He used to spend all his free time, and most of his money, on his inventions. He continued his experiments with sound vibrations. He even copied the design of the human ear using iron rod and electrical wires to produce the same effect. In order to survive financially Bell had to work on the musical telegraph, but he also continued working on his mechanical voice transmitter. On that summer afternoon in 1875, when Alexander heard the first sound transmitted over his machine, realized that he had finally achieved his goal. On his 29th birthday Alexander Graham Bell registered his invention with the patent office and because they had never seen anything like it before, they registered his invention as an improvement in telegraphy. The name ‘telephone’ came later.
TEXT #23 1. Read and translate the text 2. Vocabulary exercises 3. Grammar exercises 4. Speaking tasks
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