EXTRACT B.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 387.

Electricity remained more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English physician William Gilbert made a careful study of electricity and magnetism and distinguished the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber. This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646. Further work was conducted by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work.

Electricity is an extremely flexible form of energy, and has been adapted to a huge and growing number of uses. The invention of a practical incandescent light bulb in the 1870s led to lighting becoming one of the first publicly available applications of electrical power.

With the construction of first intercontinental, and then transatlantic, telegraph systems in the 1860s, electricity enabled communications in minutes across the globe.

20. In Russian write a content-based summary of the text you have translated.

21. Translate into English the summary made in ex.20 of the text you haven't read.

22. Make a reverse written translation (from Russian into English) of the Extract you have translated.

23. Serve as simultaneous interpreter. Make an oral reverse interpretation of the text.

24. Find more information about physical and chemical properties of all the substances which occur in nature and tell your group mates.