Monologue 9 «Engineering»
Active Vocabulary: 31, Grammar Structures: 9, Linkers: 14, Total: 714 words.
A couple of centuries ago, humanity did not even suspect that someday people would live in
giant skyscrapers, cook from products with already set properties, and it would no longer be
themselves who would clean the house, but a robot vacuum cleaner. It's a reality now. No
wonder Eric Berne said that engineering is a way to change the world. It is thanks to engineering
that something exists in reality that once people could not even imagine. In this monologue, I
want to tell you more about engineering and its impact on the development of mankind.
What do engineers do? They work in many industries - in aeronautical, aerospace and
mechanical engineering, in biomedical and genetic engineering, in electrical and computer
engineering, in civil and survival engineering. Generally, everywhere! These specialists control
and prevent pollution, create advanced technologies, develop new medicines and products. Some
work in the laboratory and carry out research. In the future, I think it will come to exploring new
worlds! It helps a lot to improve the way the world works and solve certain problems, for
example, to find new uses for old products.
One of the greatest achievements of engineering is the Apollo space program. No other program
has ever allowed sending people to an environment other than their home planet and returning
them to Earth in one piece. It has contributed to significant progress in the development of
integrated circuits, which has had a beneficial effect on the state of the environment. NASA also
announced positive side effects provoked by the space program, including frozen food,
emergency warming blankets, portable hand vacuum cleaners and more than 2,000 other
inventions.
Dinosaurs became extinct precisely because they did not know about engineering and its
methods of protecting the planet. Although this happened in the distant past, nevertheless,
humanity still sometimes faces similar threats that need to be neutralized. These are
overpopulation, famine, and natural disasters such as tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes,
floods, earthquakes, and drought. In the distant (or near?) an alien invasion may be waiting for us
in the future. I wonder how humanity will solve this problem?
Fortunately, these threats are now being successfully solved by engineers. In particular, scientists
change the direction of asteroids that approach the Earth and do not burn up in its atmosphere,
thereby avoiding collisions. Specialists also build models and prototypes, do various tests and
see if they can carry loads.
The biggest man-made structure I've heard of is the transatlantic tunnel. Engineers have
proposed cutting journey times from New York to London to 54 minutes, travelling on a
magnetically-raised train. The idea is that the train will travel through a tunnel floating in the
Atlantic Ocean. The tunnel will be 45 meters below the surface of the sea and it will be nearly
5,000 kilometers long. The train will travel at speeds of well over 1,000 km/h, many times faster
than today’s fastest trains. Giant anchors will be sunk into the bottom of the sea, in some places
up to 8 kilometers deep. 54,000 tunnel sections will be transported by a special ship and will then
be lowered into place. The tunnel sections will then be attached to the anchors.
However, the tunnel will probably cost $12 trillion. These monetary expenses can be justified,
because this way people will be able to move quickly between continents, and not make flights
for several tens of hours. I think it will pay off over time.
Of course, engineering has not yet reached its heyday, so many more inventions and innovations
are waiting for humanity in the future. For example, a Russian designer proposed the concept of
a refrigerator called "Bio Robot Refrigerator", which cools food using a biopolymer gel. There
are no shelves, compartments and doors in it – you just insert food into the gel!
Thus, very soon our world will change 360 degrees in all spheres of life! Take, for instance, the
development of the transatlantic tunnel. I think even during the implementation of the Apollo
space program, people took a big step in this direction. It is not for nothing that active
developments are underway, including in the field of protecting the population and the area from
natural disasters and threats. After all, engineering is really a way to change the world!
