Unit 2b Book

Of course, products change with time: design and development engineers work on them to enhance their features and design. Look at the picture in Task 2 on p. 12 of the book (Bonamy, D. (2013). Technical English Level 4 Coursebook. Pearson Longman.), which shows a product intended for people recovering from an injury. In response to some complaints about the product, a product design team came up with some suggestions for its improvement. Read the Draft Product Design Specification on p. 13. While reading, focus on the words in bold and do this vocabulary task. Then, look at the pictures on p. 12 again, and listen to and read the transcript of a brainstorming session of a product design team on how to improve the product called SpaceRunner. They talk about what the improved product should be able to do; in other words, they use a combination of modals to describe ability and obligation (or recommendation). To be able to understand these two grammar points fully, look at each of them separately first. Revise what you know about modal verbs and phrasal modal verbs here and then practise them by doing these tasks: A (to practise can, must, and have to), B (to practise can, could and be able to), and C (to practise should, shouldn´t and could). If you think you need to practise modals further, do these extra tasks: D, E, F, G. Now that you have practised modals, you can combine this grammar point with expressions used for describing ability, which were presented in Section 3 above. This means that you will use the following sets of phrases together:

should, ought to, must, have (got) to, need to

+

be able to, have the ability to, have the capability to/of, be capable of, have the capacity to

For example:

The new train has to be able to achieve speeds of up to 600 kilometres per hour.

The new system must allow you to control everything remotely.

Now, practise the combination of these two grammar points here and here.