Unit 2a Book

1. Introduction

Unit 2a deals with a topic which is crucial for technological development in any industry: materials. The main material discussed is plastic, which seems to be everywhere around us. On one hand, plastic has lots of applications, making our lives easier in many fields, but on the other hand, microplastics have become a burning problem that will be very difficult to solve. Most plastics are made of crude oil, so perhaps one day, after all deposits of oil are depleted, plastics will have to be replaced with another material. The authors of your coursebook, however, do not seem to expect this scenario happening very soon and rather predict even more vast application in plastics in areas plastics have never been used before.

Unit 2a will give you a chance to give your opinion on this topic. It will be interesting to see whether you support the view of the authors of the coursebook, or rather believe that plastics will be replaced by some other materials. In any case, plastic is not the only material that can be replaced in the near future. There is another material that seem to reach their technological limits: silicon. Used to manufacture semiconductors, this material plays a major part in electrical engineering and information technologies. In the specialist section of this Unit, you will have an opportunity to read about promising future materials that are likely to replace silicon.

Contents:

• Materials and their properties:

Glass is transparent, sometimes only translucent and fragile. It is used for making glasses and window panes.

• Speculating about the future and expressing the level of certainty using adjectives and adverbs:

It´s possible that they will make a plastic wing one day.

They will possibly make a plastic wing one day.

2. Warm-up: Materials and Their Properties

How many materials do you know? Can you list their properties? Test yourself by completing this crossword puzzle. Then focus on plastic only. What do you think: what is the future of plastics? Do you think they will be used in the future? What will happen after crude oil deposits are depleted? Answer these questions in this forum. Finally, practise your speed reading by finding answers to these questions. You should first find the correct text in your coursebook (Bonamy, D. (2011). Technical English Level 3 Coursebook. Pearson Longman, p.117), scan the text and find the answers as quickly as possible because the task has a time limit set.

3. Listening: Plastics

You are going to listen to five news reports on the use of plastics that are illustrated in pictures A to D on p. 10 in your book (Bonamy, D. (2011). Technical English Level 3 Coursebook. Pearson Longman). Look at the pictures in Task 1 again, listen to recording 5 that comes with your coursebook and complete this task. You will hear about the use of plastics in the past, their current applications and how they will probably be used in the future.

(Note: Alternatively, you can read Transcript 5 on p. 118.)

4. Reading and Grammar: Verb Tenses

What helped you to complete the previous listening task? Perhaps it was the verb tenses and time indicators that made the task easier for you. Based on them, you were able to decide whether the speaker talked about the past, recent events, current events or made some predictions about the future. You use the present progressive tense to describe events which are currently in progress, i.e. at the time you are describing them. If you want to describe an activity which started at an unspecified time in the past and has not finished yet, you should use the present perfect tense. On the other hand, if the event you are describing happened at a specified time in the past and it is not continuing up to the present, you should use the past simple tense. And if you want to predict an event that will probably happen in the future, you use the future simple tense. To see these verb tenses in context, complete this grammar overview and then do this reading task. 

5. Predicting the Future and Degrees of Certainty

When talking about the future using the Future Simple Tense, you can also add adjectives and adverbs to indicate how certain you are about your prediction. You have several options to express the level of certainty. Practise this in this task. Just fill in the gaps with the correct expression from the drop-down list, so that the meaning of each group of sentences is the same. Then complete this follow-up task, in which you should put adjectives in order according to the level of certainty.

6. Specialist Listening and Reading: Materials and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

In electrical engineering and computer science, one of the most important materials is silicon. It is a type of material somewhere between a conductor and an insulator: it can be doped with other elements, for example, phosphorus or boron to become either an n-type semiconductor or a p-type semiconductor. The ability of this semiconductor to “switch” between the conductor and insulator, depending on the charge run through it, is a fundamental property which made digital revolution possible. To learn more about semiconductors, watch the video. As  you watch, complete this listening comprehension task. Then read about some materials that are likely to replace silicon soon. The problem with silicon is, however, that it has seemed to reach their technological limits. According to an article published in the Wall Street Journal, “the reliable biennial doubling in the computational power of microchips, known as Moore’s Law, has been slowing, and could soon come to an end. It’s pretty much impossible, using current methods, to get the elements etched into silicon, like transistors, below about 3 nanometers in their smallest dimension.” So, the tech industry is in search of other wonder materials that could possibly replace silicon. Read about them and complete all the gaps by choosing the correct option from the drop-down list. 

7. Forum 2: Replacing Silicon

Now, based on what you learned in Section 8 above, what do you think: what will future computers look like? How probable is that silicon will be replaced by another material?

In your opinion, what is the material that has the potential to replace silicon in our computers?

Is it possible that instead of our conventional computers, quantum computers will be used?

Are there any drawbacks of using quantum computers?

If one of the drawbacks was cooling, would superconductors solve this problem?

Answer at least two of these questions and respond to at least one contribution of a fellow student in this forum.

8. Word list

The key terms related to the topic of Unit 2a can be found:

• in the Excel format here.
• in the interactive flash card format here. This format is particularly good for drilling the new vocabulary.
• in a zip file here. This file is downloadable, so that after unpacking it, you can drill the new vocabulary on your desktop, laptop or any other portable device where you have a browser installed. The recommended one is Mozilla Firefox. Important: after unzipping the zip file, make sure to keep all the related files in the same directory at all times. Do not change any file names and do not transfer or delete anything.

Recommendation: Remember that the best way to learn new vocabulary is to see each new word in a context; that is, seeing it in the contexts provided in the tasks you complete in the unit.

9. A printer-friendly version of Unit 2a

A printer-friendly version of Unit 2a exercises and the keys to these exercises can be found here.