Write 2–3 sentences about some hypothetical ideas/facts/situations in the field of science.

Develop one of the ideas in exercise 1 into a paragraph (200 words).

LESSON 7. Renewables. Conditionals

Part I

Reading and discussing

Discuss the following with a partner.

1. Do you believe that in a few decades our civilization will run short of fossil fuels? If yes, why? If not, why not?
2. What alternative sources of energy do you know?
3. Why haven’t they still become widely spread in the world?

Read the text.

If electric utilities had an inexpensive way to store massive amounts of excess power generated by wind and solar when demand is low, which could later be tapped to meet peak demand, then the new renewables would expand much more quickly.

Unfortunately, decades of development have provided only one good, large-scale solution: pumping water up to an elevated reservoir so it can flow back through a turbine to generate electricity. Not many localities have the elevation change or space to make this work, and the process entails net energy loss. The alternative solution is to build an extensive array of wind and solar plants across a large region—on the scale of a major nation or half of a continent—and connect them with transmission lines, maximizing the chance that a subset of the plants will always be providing power to the grid. Better and longer transmission lines are technically possible, but they are expensive to build and often face stiff local opposition.

Ultimately mass adoption of renewable energy would require a fundamental reshaping of our modern energy infrastructure. For electricity, it would entail a shift from a relatively small number of very large thermal or hydropower plants to a much greater number of small, distributed wind and solar systems. For liquid fuels, it would require moving from extraction of high-power-density oil to production of lower-power-density biofuels. In many ways, a transition to renewables is more demanding than the prior shifts from coal to oil and then to natural gas.

The final factor leading to a prolonged shift is the size and cost of existing infrastructure. Even if we were given free renewable energy, it would be economically unthinkable for nations, corporations or municipalities to abandon the enormous investments they have made in the fossil-fuel system, from coal mines, oil wells, gas pipelines and refineries to millions of local filling stations—infrastructure that is worth at least $20 trillion across the world.

Answer the questions.

1. What puts an obstacle on the way of renewables advance?
2. How many good large-scale solutions to storing massive amounts of excess power generated by wind and solar when demand is low have been provided yet?
3. Why does the author say that a transition to renewables is more demanding than the prior shifts from coal to oil and then to natural gas?

Summarize the text in 3-4 sentences and express your own opinion on the problem of renewables.

Part II

Conditionals

Sentences with real condition

(first conditional)

Answer the questions.

1. Can we use the verb will to refer to the future in conditional sentences?
2. What verb form is used in the conditional sentence?

Translate the sentences.

1. When we become able to repair cells, we will be also able to build replicating assemblers and excellent spacecrafts.
2. If the reading wave has the same wavelength as a particular reference wave, and is beamed into the block at the same angle, it will pick out the data page stored using that reference wave.  
3. If you're having trouble keeping track of all the forces and the particles of matter, you'll welcome the modern reformulation of Einstein's goal of a unified theory.
4. As computers with a single processor are replaced by machines with multiple processors and “multicore” processors software designers will need a new way to program desktop applications and operating systems.

Translate into Russian.

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