Вопрос № 1058584 - Английский язык

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Solar energy
1. Solar energy, radiant light and heat from the sun, has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of different technologies. Solar radiation, along with secondary solar-powered resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available renewable energy on the Earth. Only a minuscule fraction of the available solar energy is used.
2. Solar powered electrical generation relies on heat engines and photovoltaics. Solar energy's uses are limited only by human ingenuity. A partial list of solar applications includes space heating and cooling through solar architecture, potable water via distillation and disinfection, daylighting, high temperature process heat for industrial purposes. To harvest the solar energy, the most common way is to use solar panels.
3. Solar technologies are broadly characterized as either passive solar or active solar depending on the way they capture, convert and distribute solar energy. Active solar techniques include the use of photovoltaic panels and solar thermal collectors to harness the energy. Passive solar techniques include orienting a building to the Sun, selecting materials with favorable thermal mass or light dispersing properties, and designing spaces that naturally circulate air.
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What is the difference of solar technologies?

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Solar energy
1. Solar energy, radiant light and heat from the sun, has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of different technologies. Solar radiation, along with secondary solar-powered resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available renewable energy on the Earth. Only a minuscule fraction of the available solar energy is used.
2. Solar powered electrical generation relies on heat engines and photovoltaics. Solar energy's uses are limited only by human ingenuity. A partial list of solar applications includes space heating and cooling through solar architecture, potable water via distillation and disinfection, daylighting, high temperature process heat for industrial purposes. To harvest the solar energy, the most common way is to use solar panels.
3. Solar technologies are broadly characterized as either passive solar or active solar depending on the way they capture, convert and distribute solar energy. Active solar techniques include the use of photovoltaic panels and solar thermal collectors to harness the energy. Passive solar techniques include orienting a building to the Sun, selecting materials with favorable thermal mass or light dispersing properties, and designing spaces that naturally circulate air.
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Gravitation
1. Gravitation is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass. In everyday life, gravitation is most familiar as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped. Gravitation causes dispersed matter to coalesce, and coalesced matter to remain intact, thus accounting for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, and most of the macroscopic objects in the universe.
2. Gravitation is responsible for keeping the Earth and the other planets in their orbits around the Sun; for keeping the Moon in its orbit around the Earth; for the formation of tides; for natural convection, by which fluid flow occurs under the influence of a density gradient and gravity; for heating the interiors of forming stars and planets to very high temperatures; and for various other phenomena observed on the Earth.
3. Gravitation is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, along with electromagnetism, and the nuclear strong force and weak force. Modern physics describes gravitation using the general theory of relativity by Einstein, in which it is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime governing the motion of inertial objects. The simpler Newton's law of universal gravitation provides an accurate approximation for most physical situations.
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Who Are Currency Speculators?
1. They are financial swashbucklers, ready to throw down fortunes betting that a certain currency may rise or fall. Among the most successful swashbucklers are George Soros and Julian Robertson, who each control multibillion- dollar portfolios. Soros is known in London as “the man who broke the Bank of England”, for on September 16, 1992, Black Wednesday, Soros bet that Britain would give up trying to maintain the value of the pound against the D-mark. Soros kept his bet on a cheaper pound even after the chancellor of exchequer promised that Britain would not flee, and even after the Bank of England sharply boosted interest rates and spent $30 billion to defend the pound. Soros's fund apparently earned a billion dollars from the British bet.
2. Not all risky bets turn out so well. In early 1994, Soros admitted that his fund lost about $600 million by betting incorrectly that the dollar would strengthen against the yen, along with watching some other investments turn sour. After all, Soros made his billion dollars off of Britain because the politicians were trying to maintain a currency arrangement that imperiled the feeble British economy by propping rates up too high.
3. For all the glamour, players in the currency markets get by on hard work and tough analysis. Before speculators place their bets, they try to figure out the answers to key questions like, Is the central bank acting responsibly on monetary policy? Is the government allowing social spending to spin out of control beyond the means of the taxpayers? Are the politicians honestly portraying the country's ability to meet its debts? If the answer to any of these questions is no, the currency traders will swoop down and dump the nation's currency until leaders deliver honest answers.
4. Ultimately, the currency is a symbol of country's credibility and integrity. The international financial markets stand ready to discipline and expose fraudulent governments.
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Prosperity Decade
1. The 1920s were a period of great change in American life that lasted nearly ten years. The First World War had just ended, and a time of gay abandon, economic prosperity, and social change had set in. An unpopular prohibition law made it seem that breaking the law could be acceptable and even commonplace. The tone of the times was one of excitement, of excesses, of new freedom.
2. During the 1920s many people made money by buying shares, or stocks, in different companies. The price of a company's stock depends on business condition. If many buyers want to buy stock in a company, the price of the stock will rise. If many stock owners want to sell their stock, the price will go down. In the 1920s stock prices seemed to go in only one direction: up. There were stories of shoeshine boys and office workers who made fortunes in the stock market in one day.
3. People were making more money than ever before. Companies used advertising to encourage people to buy their products. Advertising became important to business during the 1920s. Another way of encouraging people to buy more goods was called instalment buying. When people bought a thing on the instalment plan, they had to pay only a small part of the total price for the thing. Each month they paid another small some, called an instalment. People paid instalments until they had paid the whole price of the thing they had bought.
4. People were earning a lot of money, and the system of instalment buying seemed a good idea. But some experts warned that too many Americans owed too much money. If people suddenly lost their jobs, they would not be able to pay their debts. Then business would suffer. But few people listened to these warnings. Business was expanding. People kept buying on the instalment plan. The golden years were up to 1929 - and then came Black Tuesday, the day of October 1929 of the inevitable stock market crash, that spanned ten years.
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Henry Ford
1. Modern production methods took a giant leap forward in 1913 when Henry Ford introduced the use of the assembly line in the production of automobiles. In those days, workers simply picked a spot on the factory floor, and assembled the car from the bottom up. As business grew, Ford began manufacturing many of the component parts formerly purchased from suppliers. Typically, the components were put together by one worker who performed all the operations necessary to assemble them. The method was quite costly, and so only the wealthy could afford to buy automobiles in those days.
2. This did not please Henry Ford who wanted to bring the price of automobiles down to the point where most families could afford them. The key to achieving this goal, in Ford's view, was through the improvement of labour productivity. He needed to find a way to 1) limit the number of operations performed by each worker, 2) bring the work to the worker rather than the other way around, and 3) perform each operation in the most efficient sequence he could find. He found what he was seeking in his new creation: the assembly line.
3. Ford's first line, introduced in April 1913, was used to assemble generators. Working in the old way, one worker had been able to put together 25 to 30 generators in a 9-hour day. This translated to something around 20 minutes per assembly. The new line broke the operation into 29 steps performed by individual workers on parts that were brought to them by the steadily moving assembly line. The new process reduced assembly time to an average of 13 minutes per generator.
4. One year later, additional experimentation divided production into 84 operations and reduced assembly time to 5 minutes per generator. Assembly line methods brought the price of automobiles within the reach of millions of American families. Henry Ford was not an economist, but his assembly lines had changed dramatically both American households and its factories.
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