Test 9 form (Books in our life)
план-конспект занятия по английскому языку (9 класс) на тему

                                            Test      9 form     (Books in our life)

 A.In 1945 Percy Spencer, a US engineer working for the defense systems company Raytheon was building a magnetron (the device at the core of radar that converts electricity to microwaves) when he noticed that a chocolate peanut bar in his pocket had completely melted. Guessing it was caused by the magnetron, he built a metal box and fed in microwave radiation. The first food he cooked in his improvised oven was popcorn; his second experiment, with a whole egg, ended in an explosion. The water in the egg had rapidly vaporized.

B. Puzzled by the difference in drying times between newspaper ink and the slow-drying substance in his fountain pen, Biró and his chemist brother, György, fitted a pen with a small ball-bearing which successfully drew down the printing ink as it rotated. The biro was born. An early customer was the Royal Air Force, encouraged by the pen’s performance at high altitude. This ensured the name «biro» became synonymous with the ballpoint in Britain.

C. The first practical mechanical dishwasher was invented in 1886 by Josephine Garis Cochran. A prominent socialite, married to a merchant and politician, her main problem in life was worrying about the maids chipping her precious china (it had been in the family since the seventeenth century). This enraged her and, so the story goes, one night she dismissed the servants, did the dishes on her own, saw what an impossible job it was and vowed, if no one else would, to invent a machine to do it instead.

D. Heron lived in Alexandria around 62 A.D. and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was also a visionary inventor and his aeolipile or «wind-ball» was the first working steam engine. Using the same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun round at 1 500 rpm. Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty. Amazingly, the railway had already been invented 700 years earlier by Periander, tyrant of Corinth.

E. The first written use of hello spelt with an «e» is in a letter of Edison’s in August 1877 suggesting that the best way of starting a conversation by telephone was to say «hello» because it «can be heard ten to twenty feet away». Edison discovered this while testing Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype telephone. Bell himself preferred the rather nautical «Ahoy, hoy!» Once «hello» became standard, the telephone operators were called «hello girls».

F. It is an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes in the door of his lodgings — a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens. The story plays on a classic stereotype, the genius with no common sense.

G. Though the Chinese invented the compass, gunpowder, paper, the canal lock and the suspension bridge long before anyone else, the scientific revolution that transformed the West between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries completely passed them by. The reason for this is that they also invented tea. The Chinese had been drinking tea for almost 1 400 years. Unlike wine, its colour was less important to them than temperature, and they found it was best served in their most famous invention of all: fine porcelain, or «china».

1. A minor invention

2. Five o’clock for progress

3. Another “apple story”

4. A flying start

5. If only they had met…

6. Swords into ploughshares

7. A machine to best people

8. The ultimate invention

Official Language: English

There are many countries in which English is the Official Language. It is A___________ for use in a nation’s courts, parliament and administration. However, in England, Australia and over half the USA, English is the unofficial language. B___________, but no specific law has ever ratified its use.

Bilingual countries such as Canada (French and English) and Wales (Welsh and English) do have legally defined official languages. National laws often recognise significant minority languages, as with Maori in New Zealand. Sometimes, as in Ireland, an official language is C___________: fewer than 20 per cent of the population use Irish every day.

English is frequently chosen as an alternative «official» language if a country has many native languages. A good example is Papua New Guinea where 6 million people speak 830 different languages. D___________, most notably the Hispanic community who account for more than 15 per cent of the population. Perhaps the most interesting case of an English-speaking country that doesn’t have English as its official language is Australia. As well as large numbers of Greek, Italian and South-East Asian immigrants, Australia is home to 65 000 native Maltese speakers. There are also 150 aboriginal languages which are still spoken (compared to the 600 or so spoken in the eighteenth century). E___________. Attempting to declare English the official language risks looking insensitive. The Vatican is the only country in the world in which Latin is F___________.

1. more symbolic than practical

2. Of these, all but twenty are likely to disappear in the next fifty years

3. It is used for all state business

4. defined as an official language

5. It is used for everyday life

6. defined as a language that has been given legal status

7. In the USA the campaign to make English the official language is opposed by many other ethnic groups

The Wizard of Oz and Its Creator

L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the best-selling book for children in the USA for two years after its publication in 1900. Since translated into more than forty languages, it created one of the most successful publishing franchises of all time: Baum produced a series of thirteen sequels set in the land of Oz and many more were published after his death. He also wrote the script for a musical version, which ran almost continuously on Broadway between 1903 and 1904, and was the first adaptation to use the shortened title, The Wizard of Oz.

Under the new name, in 1939 MGM took the famous book and the famous musical and turned them into an even more famous film, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. In 2009 it was named the «most watched» film of all time by the U.S. Library of Congress. Although it did well at the box office, its huge budget meant it made only a small profit and it was beaten to the Best Picture Oscar by that year’s other blockbuster, Gone with the Wind. But the immortality of The Wizard of Oz was assured by its annual Christmas screening on U.S. television, which began in 1956. It’s the most repeated movie on TV of all time.

In the original book, Dorothy’s magic slippers were silver. However, they were changed to red in the film because the producer, Mervyn LeRoy, wanted them to stand out. The Wizard of Oz was only the second film made in Technicolor and the new process made some colours easier to render than others. It took the art department over a week to come up with a yellow for the Yellow Brick Road that didn’t look green on screen.

The new technology made the six-month shoot hazardous for the actors. The lights heated the set to a stifling 38 °C and eventually caused a fire in which Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) was badly burned. The cast had to eat liquidized food through straws because their thick colour face make-up was so toxic. The original Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen, nearly died from inhaling the aluminium powder it contained and had to leave the film.

Lyman Frank Baum died in 1919, long before his book made it to the screen, although he ended his days in Hollywood as a film producer. This was the last in a long line of careers — as a breeder of fancy poultry, a newspaper editor, a theatrical impresario, the proprietor of a general store, a travelling salesman and a writer of over fifty books, many under female pseudonyms such as Edith van Dyne and Laura Metcalf. In 1900, the same year he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he also brought out The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors, which listed the many marketing advantages of using shop-window mannequins.

But it is Oz he will be remembered for and, despite all attempts at interpreting his novel as a political allegory or a feminist tract, it is best read the way he intended, as a home-grown American version of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen that he had loved as a child.

A15

L. Baum’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”

launched a chain of other creations.

was published after his death.

wasn’t very popular in 1900s.

consisted of fourteen parts.

A16

According to the author, MGM’s movie

has been on TV since 1956.

didn’t earn much in cinemas.

was based on the musical rather than the book.

beat all that year’s movies.

A17

The author mentions the main character’s shoes, because they

possessed certain qualities, and thus had to be eye-catching in the movie.

were actually silver, but looked green on the cinema screen.

were the only coloured object in the black-and-white movie.

took a lot of time to be rendered properly in Technicolor.

A18

During the six-month shoot

there was some recasting.

two people died.

the studio was burnt down.

the cast suffered food poisoning.

A19

L. Frank Baum

usually helped female writers.

was a successful businessman.

eventually became a film producer of his book.

used to raise chickens.

A20

Literary historians interpret Baum’s Oz series as

an amateur adaptation of European folk tales.

an indirect view of political life of that time.

political propaganda.

a way to express his inner feminism.

A21

What can be inferred from the text?

The Wizard of Oz franchise mainly stayed in the USA.

The book outlived its time, because it was created with love.

Film-making was highly dangerous at that time.

L. Baum wrote his book to earn popularity and money.