Unit 2 Into the Future

Lead In

1. Take turns to read the statements about the future. Do you agree with them? If not, what do you think will happen?

§ Within fifty years many people will be living on the Moon and Mars.

§ By the middle of the century scientists will have discovered a way to stop ageing and terminal diseases such as cancer, AIDS, etc.

§ People will have developed their skills of telepathy and won’t need any other means of communication.

§ Mankind may contact other living beings beyond our solar system sometime at the end of the XXI century.

§ Breakthroughs will also be made in research on cultivating human organs.

§ We'll live longer, 120 years or more.

§ We’ll crack the genetic code and doctors will be able to replace damaged DNA with healthy genes.

§ We won’t need doctors as we’ll have micro machines circulating in our blood and repairing our organs.

§ We won’t depend on the weather because we’ll learn to create favourable weather conditions.

Reading

1. Read the excerpts from the popular science articles and match them with the

headlines.

1. Imagine you’re at a party full of strangers. You’re nervous. Who are these people? How do you strike a conversation? Fortunately, you’re wired for social success: You’ve got a gizmo that beams energy at microchips in everyone’s name tag. The chips beam back name, occupation, hobbies, obsessions, phobias, favorite movie, and availability for a date this Friday night – whatever. This hasn’t quite happened in real life. But the world is already undergoing a revolution involving REID – radio frequency identification…
2. Imagine an army of tiny robots, each no bigger than a bacterium, swimming through your bloodstream. One platoon* takes continuous readings of blood pressure in different parts of your body; another monitors cholesterol; still others measure blood sugar, hormone levels and immune system activity… If the nanotech experts are right, a call to a family doctor a few decades from now could be a high-tech variation on an old cliché: «Take two teaspoons of diagnostic sensors, and call me in the morning.”
3. Soon teams of up to 40 robots could be employed as border security guards and outside airports. The patrolling robots will use Wi-Fi to share what they see, sniff and hear. They may even be able to triangulate* the exact position of an intruder, or the source of plume of smoke from an explosion, something no single robot could do. The ideal is swarms* of robots that need no central control. And McLurkins’s robots have proved the principle that, equipped with the right algorithms, swarms of hardware can have autonomous control. Last year, for instance…
---------------------- platoon – зд есь взвод, отряд
4. … Self-heating hats and glow-in the-dark sweatshirts might correctly be labeled as ‘smart’, but how about a shirt that ‘knows’ whether you are free to take a cell phone call or retrieve information from a 1000 page safety manual displayed on your inside pocket? Such items, termed ‘intelligent’ clothing to distinguish them from their lower-tech cousins, have proved…
------------------------- triangulate – дать трехмерное изображение swarm – здесь стая, толпа

A. Wearable Intelligence

B. The Radio Age

C. Robot Army Will Think For Itself

D. And Will They Go Inside Us?

What do you think?

Ø Which technologies that you have read about are most likely to be implemented in future? Why?

Ø What other innovations do you expect to see in your daily life in the future? Why?

Ø What challenges do you think will the 21st century bring?

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30