Discoveries and Inventions

Improving our lives

Provide better mobility

Improve housing and lifestyle

Give easier access to information

Set examples of innovation and creativity

Help to avoid mistakes

Help people in menial work

Make travelling more convenient

Provide better communication

Improve efficiency and productivity

Save time

Provide better entertainment

Make studying easier

Provide access to numerous resources

Create new opportunities to make money

Automate boring tasks

Boost motivation of students

Harming our lives

Make you lazy

Lead to loss of some human abilities

Be too complicated to use

Increase loneliness

Reduce creativity

Replace people at work

Lead to neglect of real life

Distract from work

Be too expensive

May be risky

Make people dependent

Increase unemployment

Can be distracting

Disconnect people from face-to-face relationships

1. People have learnt much from behaviour of animals. (Present Perfect, т.к. действие, произошедшее в неустановленное время в прошлом. При этом действие более важно, чем время)

2. People thought the Earth was flat. (Past Simple, т.к. общеизвестный факт в прошлом)

3. Many years ago people used to live with very few things and used to have a lot of time to think. (Конструкция used to, т.к. говорится о том, что что-то когда-то происходило, но в настоящем времени не происходит)

4. Today people have many electronic devices at their homes and use them every day. (Present Simple, т.к. повторяющиеся действия в настоящем)

Read the text and fill in the gaps with the words from those below. Three words are extra. 

Cloning has become a very serious issue and a lot of people are worried about the possible consequences it could bring. But if we try to play with (1) _____, it will fire back. The consequences might be horrible!  Cloning is a very complicated subject. On the positive side, there is the possibility of curing and finally putting an end to disease and famine. On the negative side, there is the potential abuse of the system, by designing your own (2) ______ and even having factories for creating babies! These are the two extremes though, and we have a long way to go before we can reach this.  Think what cloning techniques could (3) _____. If there is a childless couple, a sample of the mother’s DNA could be extracted and modified so that she could have children. This would bring happiness to so many families and there is nothing (4) ______ with it. But what if a mother wanted to choose exactly what her child would look like? This sounds quite frightening. The society where people would look the same (5) _____ each other is quite scary. Almost everyone would be good-looking and fit and intelligent. Would you want to live in a world like that? How do we make sure that it isn’t taken too (6) ______? There are also a lot of people who say that curing some diseases is wrong. Maybe they are right; maybe we should be careful how we use cloning. It’s one thing to rid of diseases like cancer and AIDS, but how do we decide what to cure and what (7) ______ to cure? Another problem is if we do eradicate diseases and famine, won’t the population of the world suddenly increase? This could be (8) _______ for the world. The Earth would be overpopulated and we would eventually run out of space and resources. There would have to be a restriction on how many children each mother can have. Clearly this is a (9) ______ problem.  We can either overpopulate the world, or we can exist as we are at the moment.

to catastrophic far as thought not wrong do children identical nature major