Номер 1, страница 81, часть 2 - гдз по английскому языку 10 класс учебник Демченко, Юхнель

LESSON 12. Progress check

Communicative area: testing your reading, listening and speaking skills

I. READING

1. Read the article and say in 2-3 sentences what it is about.

He's head and shoulders above the rest

Yes, Edward Witten is tall – head and shoulders above many. However, his name is known to every physicist in the world because he is ‘smarter than anyone else’, as his colleagues say.

At the age of 9 or 10, Edward Witten dreamed of growing to become an astronomer. After his parents had given him a telescope, he was able to see the rings of Saturn.

At the age of 11, his father, a theoretical physicist specialising in gravitation and general relativity, introduced him to calculus. For a while, mathematics became his passion.

Eventually, at the age of 21 he had to choose between mathematics and theoretical physics after having tried history and economics. As a result, in 1976 he received a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton.

Surprisingly, in 1990, Witten was awarded the Fields Medal – an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics. To understand this, one should imagine a famous professional basketball player receiving the highest football award. Witten was the first physicist to receive this prize, which means he has a talent of expressing physical ideas in mathematical form. Mathematics has always been an important tool in physics. Witten is showing how physics can help understand mathematics better.

He created M-theory – a combination of 5 superstring theories and 11-D supergravity. He thinks that there exist not 4 (length, width, height and time) dimensions, but 11. His theory could connect quantum mechanics and general relativity, and it could take us closer to the truth about nature. Edward Witten has made physics a source of inspiration once again!

As Witten had made important contributions to both physics and mathematics, in 2004 he appeared in the list of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people.

His fellow physicists consider him Albert Einstein’s successor and even the greatest physicist of all time, a person who comes along once in a century. They claim he has brought light where there was darkness. Albert Einstein did not manage to create a theory that would unite relativity and quantum physics into one mathematical package. Thanks to Edward Witten, physicists might be close to success.

Witten thinks that physics has many mathematical secrets, and physicists will continue surprising the mathematical world with interesting insights. He says humbly, “I have been lucky to be at the right place at the right time to contribute to part of this”.

1. Прочитайте статью и в 2-3 предложениях скажите, о чем она.

Ответ: This article is about Edward Witten, a brilliant theoretical physicist and mathematician. It covers his major contributions to science, such as M-theory, and highlights the high regard his colleagues have for him, considering him one of the greatest physicists of all time.

Перевод: Эта статья об Эдварде Виттене, гениальном физике-теоретике и математике. В ней рассказывается о его значительном вкладе в науку, таком как М-теория, и подчеркивается высокое уважение, которое испытывают к нему его коллеги, считая его одним из величайших физиков всех времен.