Text 1. Сomputers Concern YouWhen Ch. Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, invented the first calculating machine in 1812, he could hardly have imagined the situations we find ourselves in today. Almost everything in modern world is done with the help of computers – the complicated descendants (потомки) of his simple machine. Computers are being used more and more extensively in the world today, for the simple reason that they are far more efficient that human beings. They have much better memories and can store (запоминать) great amount of information and they can do calculations in a fraction of the time required by a human mathematician. No man alive can do 500,000 sums in one second, but a modern computer can. In fact, computers can do many things we do, but faster and better. They can control machines at factories, work out tomorrow’s weather and even play chess, write poetry or compose music. Let’s look now at some of the ways in which computers concern people in their daily lives and work. Many people associate computers with the world of science and mathematics, but they are also a great help to scholars in subjects: in history, literature and so on. It is now possible her a scholar to find a book or an article he needs very quickly, nowadays when a million or more new books are published year is quite an advantage. You tell the computer which subject you are interested in and it producers any microfiche (микрофише) you need in seconds. There are also systems which are being developed to translate articles from foreign magazines by computer and to make up many lists of information which are needed in a modern library. So, computer can help us to deal with the knowledge explosion in many ways. One can imagine a time when libraries will by run by computers, without human beings at all. Or, let”s take another example. When a man drives a can for long distances he has two problems: to keep the car at a constant speed and watch that he does not run into the car in front of him. Engineers are now experimenting with a system which has a computer control of these two problems. The car’s computer keeps the speed constant. The beam meets the rear reflectors of the car in front and it is reflectors back, which enables to measure the distance. This information is fed to the computer which adjusts its speed control accordingly.
Text 2. Importance of transportation Many of the world’s major cities were built long before the car appeared and people realized the need to built efficient road systems. Current traffic management problems may be connected with old city planning. The thing that saves some of these cities is an effective public transport system, usually below ground. London has an old but effective underground train system known as a tube, and a comprehensive bus and train system above the ground. Hong Kong has cheap, swift and effective public transport in the form of Mass Transit Railway, buses and ferries. But there are newly built cities, such as for example, Dallas, Baltimore and Los Angeles in America. Dallas is a wealthy city in Texas, which has grown up in an era when cars were considered to be essential to move about. It has an excellent road system, as does Baltimore, another new city with wise city leaders who insisted on building good roads. However, the public transport system in both Dallas and Baltimore is extremely poor. As a result, travel in these cities is easy except for peak hour, when a twenty minute run can take more than an hour traffic jams. Los Angeles suffers from chronic highway blockages, despite efforts to encourage people to use public transport. Cities with good road system can use other methods to reduce the number of vehicles traveling together at peak hour. Flexible time is one good method: offices open and close at different times so people are traveling to and from work at different times. Vehicles carrying more than one person can use special priority lanes, which mean they can travel more quickly. There are even systems to make peak hours car use more expensive, with electronic chips recording the presence of a vehicle in a given high traffic area at a given time.
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