1. Read the text and mark the statements as T (true), F (false) or NS (not stated). WHITE ROOFS FOR A BRIGHT FUTURE! The effects of global warming are becoming more and more noticeable with the passing of the years. The number of floods, storms and heatwaves has increased as a result of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that do not allow the sun’s heat to escape the Earth’s atmosphere. However, a simple and quite possibly effective idea has been suggested as a way to help lessen the consequences of climate change. Professor Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary and a Nobel Prize winner, suggests that painting our rooftops white will help the Earth’s temperature to drop. The idea is that if enough surfaces - rooftops, pavements, roads - are painted white, more sunlight will reflect off these surfaces and go back into space. This will help cool our planet down. According to scientists, if rooftops and roads were painted white it would reduce the amount of CO2 by billions of tons. This would be the same as taking every car in the world off the streets for 11 years. Not only this, but homes with white rooftops and cars that are painted white wouldn’t absorb so much heat from the sun. This means that they would be cooler and people wouldn’t have to turn on their air conditioners as much. Consequently, we would save more energy and reduce the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere. Although the idea of white rooftops has been generally welcomed by the scientific and environmental communities, there appear to be a few problems. One of these is the fact that the colour white would be too bright if it was painted on too many large surfaces. Another concern is that keeping the white surfaces in good condition for a long period of time would be too expensive. Pessimists feel that though painting rooftops and pavements in light colours is good in theory, it is just a very small step to take towards reducing the Earth’s temperature. What we must remember though, is that there is not one solution to global warming. It’s the combination of different methods that will help our planet get back on its feet. 1. There has been an increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in recent years. ___ 2. Some people feel that painting surfaces white will not be enough to solve the problem of global warming. ___ 3. Buildings with white rooftops don’t need air conditioning. ___ 4. Professor Chu suggests painting every large surface on the Earth white. ___ 5. Professor Chu’s suggestion has been accepted by many experts. ___
Mikhail Lomonosov (19.11 (08.11. O.S.) 1835 - 15.04.(04.04. O.S.) 1765) - Russian poet and scientist.
Lomonosov was the son of a poor fisherman. At the age of 10 he too took up that line of work. When the few books he was able to obtain could no longer satisfy his growing thirst for knowledge, in December 1730, he left his native village, penniless and on foot, for Moscow. His ambition was to educate himself to join the learned men on whom the tsar Peter I the Great was calling to transform Russia into a modern nation.
The clergy and the nobility, attached to their privileges and fearing the spread of education and science, actively opposed the reforms of which Lomonosov was a lifelong champion. His bitter struggle began as soon as he arrived in Moscow. In order to be admitted to the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy he had to conceal his humble origin; the sons of nobles jeered at him, and he had scarcely enough money for food and clothes. But his robust health and exceptional intelligence enabled him in five years to assimilate the eight-year course of study; during this time he taught himself Greek and read the philosophical works of antiquity.
Noticed at last by his instructors, in January 1736 Lomonosov became a student at the St. Petersburg Academy. Seven months later he left for Germany to study at the University of Marburg, where he led the turbulent life of the German student. His work did not suffer, however, for within three years he had surveyed the main achievements of Western philosophy and science. His mind, freed from all preconception, rebelled at the narrowness of the empiricism in which the disciples of Isaac Newton had bound the natural sciences; in dissertations sent to St. Petersburg, he attacked the problem of the structure of matter.
In 1739, in Freiberg, Lomonosov studied firsthand the technologies of mining, metallurgy, and glassmaking. Also friendly with the poets of the time, he freely indulged the love of verse that had arisen during his childhood with the reading of Psalms. The "Ode," dedicated to the Empress, and the Pismo o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva ("Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification") made a considerable impression at court.
After breaking with one of his masters, the chemist Johann Henckel, and many other mishaps, among which his marriage at Marburg must be included, Lomonosov returned in July 1741 to St. Petersburg. The Academy, which was directed by foreigners and incompetent nobles, gave the young scholar no precise assignment, and the injustice aroused him. His violent temper and great strength sometimes led him to go beyond the rules of propriety, and in May 1743 he was placed under arrest. Two odes sent to the empress Elizabeth won him his liberation in January 1744, as well as a certain poetic prestige at the Academy.
While in prison he worked out the plan of work that he had already developed in Marburg. The 276 zametok po fizike i korpuskulyarnoy filosofi ("276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics") set forth the dominant ideas of his scientific work. Appointed a professor by the Academy in 1745, he translated Christian Wolff's Institutiones philosophiae experimentalis ("Studies in Experimental Philosophy") into Russian and wrote, in Latin, important works on the Meditationes de Caloris et Frigoris Causa (1747; "Cause of Heat and Cold"), the Tentamen Theoriae de vi Aлris Elastica (1748; "Elastic Force of Air"), and the Theoria Electricitatis (1756; "Theory of Electricity"). His friend, the celebrated German mathematician Leonhard Euler, recognized the creative originality of his articles, which were, on Euler's advice, published by the Russian Academy in the Novye kommentari.