Номер 4, страница 224 - гдз по английскому языку 9 класс учебник Лапицкая, Демченко

Unit Eight, Lesson Three, Exercise one B.

Four B.

Communication is the ability to share information. We need communication in every sphere of our life: family, school, friends, work, business, medicine, sport, entertainment.

The word telecommunication comes from Greek and means communication at a distance. Now, it is a general term for systems of technologies that are used in sending and receiving messages over a distance electronically. Mobile and satellite phones, radio, television, and networks are a few examples of telecommunication.

It is sometimes hard to realize that your computer began with primitive and even ancient forms of telecommunication. There was a time when cave drawings were painted on the walls of caves and canyons to tell the story of people's culture. But real communication began with language. Storytelling was used to tell stories before there were books. Town criers shouted their messages across short open spaces. People ran to deliver messages faster. When running with a message, to deliver it in spoken form, it is safer to do it oneself. Sending anyone else is unreliable, as the game of Chinese whispers demonstrates. So a system of writing was necessary.

When writing appeared, messages on stone columns communicated very well across time, but they were an inefficient method of communication across space. The system became more efficient when it was the message that traveled. People ran with the written messages, rode horses to save time. For example, the network of Persian roads in the fifth century before Christ made communication faster and more reliable. New men and fresh horses were available at posting stations. A message could travel the full distance of the road from Susa to Sardis, three thousand two hundred kilometers, in ten days.

What helped to make communication even more efficient was the Aramaic language as the lingua franca used in ancient Persia. There were forms of long-distance communication not based on words. The smoke signals used by American Indians are of this kind. So are fires, which usually meant danger or victory. Drums in the jungles of Africa and Asia were one way to send signals to neighboring groups. Ancient Egypt was the first country where birds, domesticated pigeons, were used for sending messages. Genghis Khan saw their potential, and pigeons carried news of each new victory to his homeland in Mongolia. Ship's flags and semaphores, mechanical devices on towers, were other forms of telecommunication. The true jump came with the electricity, leading to the telegraph and signal lamps.

Eighteen forty-three was the year when Samuel Morse proposed a way to give every letter and number a special code: point, line, and space. It was Morse's symbol code, which we can still find used today. Seven years later, Antonio Meucci and Graham Bell independently managed to build an early telephone. Since Meucci didn't have the money to patent his invention, the cost was two hundred and fifty dollars at the time, it was Bell who managed to register it first.

Many other innovations were soon to come. In eighteen ninety-five, Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless telegraph, radio. Alexander Popov from Russia, whose invention of the radio came before Marconi's, did not patent it. In nineteen twenty-three, television was invented. In nineteen forty-seven, the invention of transistors gave birth to the field of electronics. In nineteen sixty-nine, the first microprocessor was invented. The rest of the story is widely known. In nineteen eighty-three, the military project ARPANET became available to universities and research centers, which finally gave birth to the Internet. Email began to take place of snail mail.

In short, telecommunication has come a long way from cave paintings and smoke signals to radio waves traveling to other planets. Maybe someday, all we will have to do is to think and it will be done for us. Only the future will tell. Hundreds of years ago, no one would have dreamed of all the things we have today.