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READING

TBILISI STUDIES SHAKESPEARE

The Shakespeare Studies Center in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, - a part of its university's department of Romance (романские) and Germanic languages has many early editions of the plays, a large library of books about Shakespeare, including many in Georgian and Russian, and books given by Shakespearian centres in Statford-on-Avon, Washington and Weimar and also tapes (пленки) of famous actors and actresses reading Shakespeare.

The center has built up a great reputation and many foreign scholars (ученые-гуманитарии) have visited it and lectured there.

A Shakespeare symposium it organized attracted scholars and actors from all-over the world.

The center often helps with the productions (зд. постановки) of the plays which Georgian audiences have long loved, among them productions of Romeo and Juliet and King Lew at the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi.

SCIENCE

Iron's Early History

No one knows how long man has used iron. Iron one is to be found in аlmost all countries, and primitive man in many lands knew how to use it many centuries ago.

One can only guess (догадываться) as to the way man first learned that ore could be melted and used for his tools. Perhaps some primitive man's camp fire first smelted (плавить) iron by accident. Legend says that fifteen hundred years before Christ (1) a forest fire showed the people of the island of Crete (Крит) how to make iron. Pictures which date back to thirty-five hundred years before Christ show Egyptians smelting iron with the air of a goat-skin bellows (мехи из козьей кожи). However (2) man may have found out how to make iron, it was made by the same method in ancient times in Africa, in China, in India, as well as in the countries around the Mediterranean . to England Caesar 0 found the Britons making iron very much as the explorer may still find it made in remote parts of Africa and Asia. Even the Romans were unable to make much improvement on the process of making iron. Rome produced thus all the metal with which Caesar armed his victorious legions. The iron which held together the oak of Columbus's ships was made in a simple fire-place like a blacksmith's forge. Iron for Washington's cannon and musket (3) was made in tall furnaces not unlike big stone chimneys (4). The fire was fed by the forced draft commonly produced by a water wheel.

We must not think that because the ancients had difficulty in making iron they could not make good iron. The fact is that their product was as good as, and even better than, most of the iron we have today. The stories are true of the splendid shinning swords of ancient heroes. We have learned merely how to make iron more easily and more cheaply. The principle of iron-making has always been the same, whether it was (5) in Central Africa or Rome, in the time of George Washington or Andrew Carnegie (6); hot fire smelts the iron out of the ore.

Coelacanth (7)

The Smithsonian Institution (8) has put on exhibit a "living fossil" fish, the coelacanth, in the coelacanth, in the National Museum. Another is at the Amercan Museum of Natural History. The coelacanth was believed by scientists to have become extinct 0 70,000,000 years ago. But a specimen was caught alive in 1938 in the Indian Ocean off South Africa; since 1952, twelve have been caught near Madagascar. The coelacanth has two pairs of limb-like fins (9) and a rudimentary lung. These are like those from which the legs, arms and lungs of man and other land vertebrates (позвоночные) could have evolved. Palaeontologists have traced the ancestry (родословная, предки) of the coelacanth back 325,000,000 years to the group of creatures (существ) from which all land vertebrates descended (произошли). The specimen put on exhibit in Washington is a forty-three-pound fifty-one inch male (самец).

No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been. (10)
Adelaide Anne Procter (England, 1825-1864)

Примечания

(1) before Christ [kraist] (сокращенно B.C) - до нашей эры

(2) However - как бы ни (см. however в приложении)

(3) Washington's cannon and musket - пушки и мушкеты Георг Вашингтона. Cannon не изменяется во множественном числе.

(4) not unlike ... chimneys - несколько похожи ... на трубы. Два отрицания not, un -дают положительный эффект. Буквально: " не похожи".

(5) whether it was ... - независимо от того, было ли это ...

(6) Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) - Эндрю Карнеги, американский "стальной король"

(7) coelacanth ['si.'ləkænθ] - целакант (рыба)

(8) Smithsonian Institution - см. примечание (2) к уроку 20

(9) limb-like fins - плавники, похожие на конечности

(10) We always may be what we might have been - мы всегда можем стать тем, чем могли бы стать (т.е. никогда не поздно наверстать упущенное)