Answer the following questions.

1. Who was the first to collect and study plants?

2. What do plants in people's designs and ornamentations mean?

3. Why is botany considered an important part of education?

4. What did domestication of plants result in?

5. How did the early man distinguish plants?

6. Who contributed to the attempt to name and catalogue plants?

7. Why was worship of the sun often combined with the worship of plants in primitive tribes and early civilizations?

8. Why has botany been considered an important part of a liberal education?

Text for annotation

FLORA AND FAUNA OF BELARUS

About one third of the area of Belarus is covered by forests. The forests of Belarus sprawl over million hectares of land. These million hectares of land and the rivers and lakes are the habitats of different types of flora and fauna of Belarus. Thousands of rare species characterize these forests. The flora consists of around 111 different types of trees. About twelve thousand species of plants and mushrooms can be found in these forests. Mainly fir and pine wood trees form these dense forests. There are thirteen types of pine woods and 12 types of fir woods available here.

The fauna of Belarus is noted for its diversity. Around 464 species of invertebrates and more than thirty thousand vertebrates make the fauna of Belarus. About 60 species of fish and 305 species of birds are present here. About six classes of mammals represent the mammal family in Belarus. Elks, wild boars, deer, roe deer, wolves, hares, beavers, and wolves are mostly found in the country. Some of the species endangered. The natural resources of the forests are being used at such rapid rates that lots of species are becoming extinct. Government and various organizations are taking initiatives to control the menace. Bialowieza Forest has been recognized as World Heritage site by UNESCO because of the varied flora and fauna available there. This initiative has restricted hunting and deforestation to a great extent.

ПЛАН РАБОТЫ

По английскому языку

для студентов ОЗО биологического факультета

Специальности «Биология», «Биоэкология»

СЕМЕСТР 8 часов

Литература:

1. Murphy, R. “English Grammar in Use” / R. Murphy. – Cambridge University Press, 1997.

2. Нестерчук, Г.В. Biology-Focused Reading / Г.В. Нестерчук, Н.А. Паукова. – Брест, 2010.

3. The Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia [Electronic resource].

4. Макаревская, Е.В. English for Students of Biology / Е.В. Макаревская. – Минск, 1989.

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Oral Topic

ECOLOGYCAL PROBLEMS

One of the most difficult problems of the contemporary world is the ever-growing amount of waste created each year. Some people in the West ironically call their society the "throwaway society". For many years people thought that endless resources would allow them to produce an endless supply of goods and bottomless landfills would allow disposing of an endless stream of waste. But now humankind is beginning to drown in that stream.

All solid waste can be divided into three categories: household (municipal) waste, which is generated in our houses at a rate of one ton per person each year; hazardous waste (toxic chemicals, medical waste, heavy metals and nuclear waste), which is now being produced in the same quantities as house-hold waste, and industrial waste, which is created at a rate of one ton per week for every woman, man and child. So taking into account all these categories, every person in the developed countries produces more than twice his or her weight in waste every year

The majority of the rubbish approximately 80 percent is disposed in the land fills, about 15 percent is incinerated and only 5 percent is recycled.

Many of us grew up in the assumption that there would always be a hole wide enough and deep enough to take care of all our trash. But this assumption was wrong. The volume of trash is now so high that many countries are, running out of places to put it. Many landfills are packed to capacity and closed. Those still in operation look like a huge mountains of trash For example, the large landfill near New York City, which receives 44 million pounds of garbage every single day, is so high that it may soon legally require a Federal Aviation Administration permit as a threat to aircraft’s!

And' what is in these mountains of garbage? Various forms of paper, mostly newspapers, mail order catalogs, telephone books and packaging take up approximately half the space. Another 20 percent is made up of construction wood and organic waste, especially food. (15 percent of all food, purchased by Americans ends up in landfills). The rest consists of plastic waste (mostly plastic bottles and film), metals 'and glass and a conglomeration of odds and ends.

Scientists believed that paper and food would eventually decompose in landfills, but that' was not so. Specialists called "garbologists", who explored the landfills, recovered the hot-dogs, buried there several decades ago; which were not touched by the process of decomposition! This can be explained by the lack of oxygen in landfills. Various microorganisms called decomposers can not do' their work in such conditions.

But when the organic waste does ultimately decompose, a great deal of methane is produced. This poses a threat of explosions and underground fires in dumps that do not have proper ventilation. Landfills release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which contributes to the global warming.

Most industrial waste is disposed of on the sites owned by the generator often next to the facility that creates the waste. But the technology for disposing waste has not caught up with the technology of producing it.

Some countries which have run out of places to dump waste, try to export garbage to the less developed countries. Several years ago an American ship, loaded with the toxic ash from the incinerator, sailed to the costs of Africa and Asia, searching for the place to get rid of its load. After a two-year journey it finally disposed, the ash on the shore of Asia.

Some officials in California wanted to organize regular shipments of their solid waste to the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. Officials in Baltimore were negotiating with China for permission to dump their municipal waste in Tibet.

Developing countries have their own problems with waste, especially in the large and growing cities. In Cairo, for example, people put garbage on the roofs to decompose in the sun. One can imaging the smell, filling the streets and houses in this city! In many Third World cities untreated sewage and garbage flows freely in the gutters and streets. Piles of garbage are picked over by legions of poor men, women and children These conditions often lead о massive outbreaks of cholera.

In the Philippines a growing mountain of trash called Smokey Mountain — in a suburb of Manila has become, a kind of waste city 25 000 people live in cardboard huts there They stake out territories in the midst of the waste, even though they and their children are choking on smoke from the fires, fuelled by decomposition.

Home Reading

THEORY OF EVOLUTION

If a species can develop only from a preexisting species, then how did life originate? Among the many philosophical and religious ideas advanced to answer this question, one of the most popular was the theory of spontaneous generation, according to which living organisms could originate from nonliving matter. With the increasing tempo of discovery during the 17th and 18th centuries, however, investigators began to examine more critically the Greek belief that flies and other small animals arose from the mud at the bottom of streams and ponds by spontaneous generation. Then, when Harvey announced his biological dictum ex ovo omnia ("everything comes from the egg"), it appeared that he had solved the problem, at least insofar as it pertained to flowering plants and the higher animals, all of which develop from an egg.

The idea of evolution is the notion that kinds of living things on Earth change gradually from one form to another over the course of time. In Darwin's time, it was traditional to believe that the various kinds of organisms and their individual structures resulted from direct actions of the Creator. Species were held to be unchangeable or immutable over the course of time.

As knowledge of plant and animal forms accumulated during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, a few biologists began to speculate about the ancestry of those organisms, though the prevailing view was that promulgated by Linnaeus, namely, the immutability of the species. Among the early speculations voiced during the 18th century Erasmus Darwin, an English physician and the grandfather of Charles Darwin, concluded that species descend from common ancestors and that there is a struggle for existence among animals. A French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was probably the most important of the 18th-century evolutionists, recognized the role of isolation in species formation; he also saw the unity in nature and conceived the idea of the evolutionary tree.

But it was not until after his travels in the "Beagle" in 1831, during which he observed great richness and diversity of islands and continents that Darwin began to develop his theory of evolution. A complete theory of evolution was not announced, however, until the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. In his book Darwin stated that all living creatures multiply so rapidly that, if left unchecked, they would soon overpopulate the world. According to Darwin, the checks on population size are maintained by competition for the means of life. Hence, if any member of a species differs in some way that makes it better fitted to survive then it will have an advantage that its offspring would be likely to perpetuate. He presented his ideas in such convincing detail that they could logically be accepted as explaining the diversity of life on the earth, the intricate adaptations of living things and the ways in which they are related to one another.

Conceptually, the theory was of the utmost significance, accounting as it did, for the formation of new species. Following the subsequent discovery of the chromosomal basis of inheritance and the laws of heredity, it could be seen that natural selection does not involve the sharp alternatives of life or death but results from the differential survival of variants. Today the universal principle of natural selection, which is the central concept of Darwin's theory, is firmly established.