A2
Science and Technology
Country Profile
Wales Warm up
1
1 Cerys is visiting her cousin Evan in Canada. She has gone to
his school to talk about Wales. Listen and fill in the gaps to complete the fact file.
Capital: .................... Population: .................... Official languages: .................... Currency: .................... National symbols: daffodil, leek, .................
Cardiff Castle
Reading comprehension
Words to remember awesome: canaries: coal mining: particle: sobering:
2 Read the blog below and complete the spaces with the missing words or symbols.
aeroplane
radio
=
+
Internet
particle*
Great Welsh Scientists!
Key Language I think that .......... is the most important because .............… I agree / I don’t agree because ...........................................
1
It was the Americans that put the first man on the moon but there are lots of great Welsh scientists too. In 1557 Robert Recorde introduced the equals (1) .......... and the plus (2) .......... symbols. In the 1960s and 70s, Donald Davies, a computer scientist, developed ‘packets’ which put computer data into groups. It was a fundamental step towards the invention of the (3) .......... . Some people believe that, in 1896, William Frost built and flew the first (4) .......... . Unfortunately there are no written records of this and so the glory goes to the American Wright brothers. In 2012, Lyn Evans, ‘Evans the Atom’, was the leader of a group of international scientists who discovered the Higgs boson (5) .......... , which gives mass to everything in the universe. It has taken scientists over 40 years to find this particle. And finally, most people know that Marconi, the inventor of the (6) .......... , was from Italy, but not many people know that his first radio transmission was between two points in Wales in 1897!
Over to you
3 Which of the inventions above do you think is the most important? Why?