Advanced level English - technical

     Science and technology have made their way into competition sports   so like such similar as skiing and athletics, almost as  most soon many much as they have in the world of motor racing.
    Equipment manufacturers are spending increasingly increased increasly increasing large budgets on research and development, and making more and more use of state-of-the-art materials, such as kevlar and carbon fibres in the production of a whole hole wohle old range of sports items, from skis to tennis rackets. At the same time, designers are using computer assisance assistant assisted assisting design programs to produce low-weight high-performance equipment, which is stretching the capacity of today's athletes far below beyond behind belong that of previous generations of champions.
    Everywhere, technology designed to help aerospace or other mechanical engineers, is being used to help sportsmen reach reaching reached reaches new frontiers of achievement.
    Members of Britain's speed skiing team, for instance, used the wind tunnel faculties factories facilities factions of a marine technology company, in order to obtain the best possible aerodynamic efficiency, as they prepared for recent winter Olympics.
    To measure the drag forces, ski bindings were attached to a table anchored to a 6-component strain gauge directly beneath, and each team member was videoed in an air stream of 40m a second. Through a window in the chamber floor, the skier was able to see his image in profile, together with a numeric display showing the drag force he was generating, so that he could adopt the best position.
    Speed skiing has been an Olympic sport since the 1990s.

WORDS
stamina: ability to continue an effort - state-of-the-art: ultra modern, cutting-edge - previous - past, earlier - achievement: success - - drag forces: CX, wind resistance - bindings: attachments -  strain gauge: apparatus for measuring tension - display: visual indicator. 

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This teaching resource is © copyright Linguapress  renewed 2021.
Revised from an article published in Spectrum, the Advanced level English newsmagazine.

This text may not be reproduced on other websites nor in printed form without written permission from the publishers. Reproduction is authorised exclusively for personal use by students, or for use by teachers with their classes.

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Student worksheet

Interactive grammar exercise
Active to passive : The passive voice is commonly used in scientific and technical English – more so than in "normal" writing.  More attention is paid to statistics and results than to the people responsible for them. 
The text uses a mixture of active and passive structures. Transform the verbs in these extracts from Skiing in the Wind from the active to the passive voice.
For example, for : They are building a new factory  you would write: A new factory is being built. (and vice-versa).
Complete each sentence using the framework given.


For more verbs in the passive, see Linguapress online grammar page: The Passive

  

Teachers section : Using this article in class

1. Classroom procedure. The cloze boxes in the article should be completed by students, either individually or collectively, before anything else is done with this text.

2. Compound nouns - a classic feature of technical English
Have students pick out the noun groups in which one noun is modified by another.
Ask students to explain these terms, for example: "muscle power" is power which requires or uses muscles, or physical strength.

3. Grammar : passives. Make sure that your students a) understand the difference between active and passive, and b) know how to apply this.
It is easy for teachers to pay insufficient attention to grammar, as if "learning grammar"  were some kind of option where learning a second or additional language is concerned. It is not. Only the very brightest of learners can easily absorb the grammar of a second language without actually learning it; for the rest, understanding the rules of grammar can be anything between very helpful and absolutely vital.
    A learner who doesn't grasp grammar rules cannot communicate effectively and unambiguously in any language other than his or her native language, which has been learned by full-time immersion over many years since childhood. For any language learned in school or through private study, teachers who stress grammar will be doing their students a big favour.  
For a full but succinct explanation of the passive, see  the Passive online or refer to A Descriptive Grammar of English, pages 30 - 34.

Answer to words cloze boxes in the original article:  such  much  increasingly  range  assisted, beyond, reach, facilities

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