TAPESCRIPTS for LISTENING

WHAT IS PHYSICS?

Physics is a key part of science and technology. It deals with how and why things behave as they do. Physics is used to solve problems – environmental problems, social problems, health problems, technological problems, and more. It’s about practical things but also involves ideas such as the origin of the universe and the tiniest building blocks of all materials.

- Physics lies at the heart of science, all engineering and much of our everyday lives.

- Physics helps explain everything in our world and beyond.

- Physics involves living and non-living things.

- Physics is exciting.

IRON

Iron is found not only in the soil, but in all plant and animal bodies that take their food from the soil. The red colours in fruits and flowers, and in the blood of the higher animals is the form in which iron is known to us. It does more, perhaps, to make the world beautiful than any other mineral element known.

EINSTEIN – an ENTIRE EPOCH

In 1979 the birth centenary of Albert Einstein, the greatest natural scientist of the 20^th century, was marked all over the world.

Einstein’s ideas determined to a considerable extent the development of the more important trends in physics throughout the 20^th century – from cosmology and the physics of elementary particles to the physics of quantum liquids and quantum electronics – and became the foundation for modern views on the nature of the Universe. For physics he was not only a scientist, but like Newton, an entire scientific epoch.

PLANTS PROSPECT for GOLD

Plants absorb and accumulate mineral substance along with subterranean waters. They are especially “avid” for rare and non-ferrous metals, particularly gold. Uzbek and Tajik researchers have recently established that the average gold content in the plants growing in one of the Central Asian gold mining areas amounted up to 2 grammes per ton of the green mass of plants (more than in ore). And some plants have a gold content of up to 11 grammes per ton. Most of the gold is accumulated in their leaves. The method elaborated by the scientists will help to accelerate and facilitate gold prospecting.

RECOGNIZING a PERSON by his VOICE

The sound-waves produced when you speak travel through the air at the rate of approximately twelve hundred feet per sound. In a normal conversation the hearer really hears only about fifty per cent of the sounds produced by the speaker and supplies the rest out of his own sense of the context. This explains why foreign languages are often easier to speak than to understand.

Precise recording instruments show that no two native speakers of a language pronounce any word or sound of that language exactly alike. There is always a slight difference between our pronunciation and that of another speaker, and this enables us to recognize a person by his pronunciation.

MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLS

There are many recognized mathematical symbols. But it is interesting to know when and where they were introduced. Here are two examples.

Ancient writers usually wrote the word “root”. This practice was followed by the use of the letter ”r”. The first known use of the present symbol was made by a German named Rudolff in 1526. It is said that he introduced it because the symbol resembled the letter “r”. It was not universally adopted until the seventeenth century.

What about the symbol for infinity? It was used by the Greeks to represent “ten thousand”. At the same time the word “infinity” was the name of a different symbol which stood for any very large number. In 1665 John Wallis took the symbol for “ten thousand” to be the symbol for a very large number. This is how it came to be used as we know it now.

DECIDING WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT

A mechanical engineer said that, in his five years’ experience, he had found that in the decision-making process among engineers, oral presentations were more useful than written reports. He explained that oral presentations were faster, easier, and more suited to immediate feedback and revision. They were also a quick and efficient way of conveying information on recent developments in the field, especially those that had just been reported in a number of different sources such as books, journals, and conferences. However, he noticed that if the engineer’s presentation skills were not good enough to convince people, the presentation might not be valued even though the content was basically excellent.

HOW TO OVERCOME “TUNNEL VISION”

Change implies giving up or replacing something, and often this is difficult. When you consider proverbs and sayings of a culture, such as “A new broom sweeps clean” or “Off with the old, on with the new”, there is sometimes a hint of regret for the old and fear of the new. Even in the sciences, there is a tendency to see things in more traditional ways.

Ideas from other fields will help you overcome “tunnel vision” – seeing things only in the traditional ways. Sometimes people’s greatest ideas come from outside their own area. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple computers, said that when he produced video games, he drew on his knowledge of perception and movement learned years earlier in a modern dance class. John von Neumann, a mathematician, developed the “game theory” model of economics by studying gamblers’ behavior at the poker tables.

In fact, Roger von Oech, a “creativity consultant”, recommends that you “take someone to lunch” to learn about their fields. This means that, to avoid tunnel vision, you should try to imagine what, for example, an airline pilot and a geologist could learn from each other if they sat down to lunch together.

HOW DO I READ MY ELECTRONIC MAIL?

I am an e-mail user. When I first started to use the e-mail system I used to read all my e-mail. I didn’t have much mail. I was very excited about receiving any e-mail. I gave my friends my e-mail address, and subscribe to two electronic bulletin boards. Soon I had more mail than I wanted. Some of the mail was junk mail. I was worried. I didn’t want my mail to control me.

I’ve tried some strategies to help me get control on my mail. First, I check my mail at the same time every day. Also I try to allow myself only 15-20 minutes every day to process my e-mail. This doesn’t work, but I try. Sometimes I save the messages. Sometimes I just read them, maybe answer a few, and then throw them away (delete them).

Sometimes I’m not at all interested in a message, so I don’t even open it. I delete it right away. This is very much the way I go through the mail that the postal service delivers to my home.

These strategies are very simple. I have some friends who are very clever with computers. Occasionally they teach me new tricks for managing my e-mail. One of the bulletin boards that I’m on has an index to organize my mail by topic and a digest if I just want to receive my mail from that bulletin board just once a day. I’ve also learned to transfer some messages to a disk so they don’t fill up my mail files. Then I can read them later and perhaps use them n my work. I’m still amazed at what e-mail can do for me! I’m still worried, however, about having too much to read.

REFERENCES

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16. www.cabex.ru

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