Read the English sentence and compare it with the Russian equivalent.

1. I was invited to the meeting.

2. Меня пригласили на собрание.

Translate the sentences. Mind the difference between the structure of the English and the Russian sentences.

1. The students were suggested to take part in the experiment.

2. Bill Gates was shown a new project that involved robotics.

 10. Translate the sentences into English.

1. В прошлом месяце меня пригласили на научную конференцию. Меня попросили рассказать о результатах эксперимента.

2. На выставке мне показали новый прибор. Мне объяснили, как он работает.

3. Вчера мне сказали, что я должен написать отчет об исследованиях. Мне дали всю необходимую информацию и попросили закончить работу к концу недели.

4. Мне предложили работу в научно-исследовательском институте. Меня попросили возглавить группу ученых.

Participles with active and passive meaning

Participle I (V-ing )

vs

Participle II (V-ed )

Study the use of the participles in the following sentences.

1. The rings, wrapping Saturn, are majestic.
2. Wrapped by hundreds of rings, Saturn is the most beautiful planet in our solar system.

Choose the correct variant to make true statements about the sentences in exercise 1.

1. In sentence 1. the participle has active/passive meaning.

2. In sentence 2. the participle has active/passive meaning.

Translate the sentences.

1. The spacecrafts were only able to spend a few weeks collecting detailed data on Saturn and its 34 known moons.
2. The data, collected by the spacecraft, were not enough to fully understand the forces at work in those intriguing rings.
3. Scientists were intrigued by the results achieved.
4. Some answers and, no doubt, new questions will arise when the first spacecraft specifically designed to explore Saturn and its vicinity will reach its destination after a seven-year journey.
5. The team, designing the new system, has made a real breakthrough in this field.
6. Led by NASA and the European Space Agency, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn is an international enterprise that will conduct a four-year study of this fascinating planet.
7. Leading specialists of the country took part in the project.

Part III

Vocabulary

Answer the questions.

1. Can you decipher the acronym laser?

2. What contribution did the MEPHI scientists make to the laser discovery?

Read the text.

Death Rays

At one time, the idea of building an x-ray laser seemed outlandish, given that making any laser is challenging. Standard lasers work because atoms are like miniature batteries: they can absorb, store and release small amounts of energy in the form of photons, or particles of light. Typically they release their energy spontaneously, but early in the 20th century Albert Einstein discovered a way to trigger the release, a process known as stimulated emission. If you cause an atom to absorb a certain amount of energy and hit it with a photon having the same amount of energy, the atom can release the originally absorbed energy— producing a clone of the photon. The two photons (the original one and its clone) go forth to trigger the release of energy from a pair of other atoms, and so on, building up a clone army in an exponential chain reaction. Laser beams are the result. Even when conditions are right, though, atoms do not always clone photons. The probability that a given atom will emit a photon when hit by another is rather small, and the atom has a greater chance of releasing its energy spontaneously before that happens.

Conventional lasers overcome this limitation by pumping in energy to prime the atoms and by using mirrors to send the cloned light surging back and forth, picking up new recruits.

For an x-ray laser, every step of this process becomes much more difficult. An x-ray photon may contain 1, 000 times more energy than an optical photon, so each atom must absorb 1, 000 times more energy. The atoms do not hold on to their energy for long. Moreover, x-ray mirrors are hard to come by. Although these impediments are not fundamental, it takes an enormous input of energy to create the lasing conditions. In fact, the first x-ray laser got its energy from an underground nuclear bomb test. It was built for a secret project, code-named Excalibur, carried out by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco.

The project is still classified, although quite a bit of information about i t has been made public. The device was a component of former US president Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Stars Wars, ” in the 1980s and was meant to act as a death ray to shoot down missiles and satellites. During the same decade, Lawrence Livermore also built the first nonnuclear laboratory- scale version of an x-ray laser, with energy supplied by powerful optical lasers that had been designed to test properties of nuclear weapons. These were not practical research instruments, though, and the possibility that x-ray lasers would ever be used routinely for science applications seemed remote.

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