u Année universitaire

Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo 023

UFR/SEA Date : /05/2023
Mathématiques Physique- Durée :
Chimie
Module: ANGLAIS SCIENTIFIC
Niveau: L1S1
Enseignant : Dr Lassina SOMA
READING COMPREHENSION
TEXT: The Significance of Chemistry in the Modern World
It is impossible to deny that science has played a major part in determining
the nature of the modern world. The food that we eat, the clothes that we wear,
the means of transportation that we use in going from place to place, the
medicines that keep us well, the weapons that we use in killing each other have
all been changed in recent years through scientific discovery.
It may well be contended that the world is now in a dangerous situation
because science and its applications have developed faster than the understanding
of the average citizen. It is evidently of great importance to attempt to improve
this situation through a program of education of the citizen in science. The world
in modern times has continued to move toward the ideal democratic system, in
which all important decisions are made by the people as a whole. In order for this
system to operate correctly the citizen must have knowledge enough of the world
to make the right decisions; and in the modern world this means that the citizen
must have a significant understanding of science.
Nearly everyone has some knowledge about science in the modern world.
We know that stockings used to be made from silk, a fiber spun by the silkworm,
and are now made in large quantities from an artificially spun fiber, nylon. We
know that penicillin, a substance made by a mold, is a very effective medicine for
protecting us against bacterial infection, and that chloramphenicol and
aureomycin are effective even against some of the virus diseases. We know that
power can be transported from one place to another by the flow of electricity
along wires, and that this flow of electricity is in fact the movement of charged
elementary particles, electrons, along the atoms that constitute the wire. We know
that, through the advance of physics during the last half century, man has
discovered how to release the immense amounts of energy that are stored up in
the nucleic of atoms; and we know that this knowledge is being used in the
manufacture of atomic bombs. We know that uranium and thorium could be used
to generate electric power, through the release of the energy stored up in the
nuclei of the uranium and thorium atoms, and that the known deposits of
minerals containing these elements could provide all of the energy required for
the world, at the present rate of use, for thousands of years.
It is evident that these are important facts, that contribute to the
determination of the nature of the modern world. In order to get an idea of how
important science is to the modern world, we might ask how many scientific facts
are now known, in comparison with the number of non-scientific facts. How great
a fraction of all of the knowledge possessed by man is now scientific knowledge
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which derives from scientific facts based on a rigorous experimentation, careful
observation, and deduction to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis?
It is impossible to answer this question precisely, because we have no scale
for measuring the comparative importance of a scientific fact and a non-scientific
fact. Nevertheless, it may be of interest to consider the rate at which our store of
scientific knowledge is being increased. During the year 1949 the journal Chemical
Abstracts, which attempts to review all of the current publications in chemistry
and closely related fields, contained abstracts of 70,000 papers in the field of
chemistry. Many of these papers report only one contribution to knowledge, which
might be described as one new scientific fact. Some of them report two or more
contributions to knowledge that might be described as separate new scientific
facts – the subject index of Chemical Abstracts for 1949 lists 220,000 items. I
believe that we may say, as a rough approximation, that about 100,000 new
chemical facts are being discovered each year, at present. Perhaps we may
multiply this number by 10, to include other sciences as well as chemistry, and
thus reach the rough conclusion that about one million new scientific facts are
being discovered each year.
How many significant non-scientific facts are added to man’s body of
knowledge each year? A non-scientific fact may be a historical event, an artistic
creation, a historical, economic, or social correlation, a new general idea published
in a paper or book. It is, of course, impossible to define a non-scientific fact
rigorously in such a way as to be equivalent to a scientific fact. Nevertheless, we
might attempt to estimate how many significant, non-ephemeral items of new
non-scientific information we have about the world, at the end of 1949, that we
did not have at the- beginning of the year. It seems to me that the number of
these non-scientific facts may well be much less than one million; and that we
may accordingly be justified in saying that scientific knowledge is at least roughly
equivalent in its significance to the modern world to non-scientific knowledge, at
the present time.
Chemistry is sometimes referred to as “the central science” due to its
interconnectedness with a vast array of other disciplines/fields such as science,
technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Chemistry and the language of
chemists play vital roles in biology, medicine, materials science, forensics,
environmental science, and many other fields. The basic principles of physics are
essential for understanding many aspects of chemistry, and there is extensive
overlap between many subdisciplines within the two fields, such as chemical
physics and nuclear chemistry. Mathematics, computer science, and information
theory provide important tools that help us calculate, interpret, describe, and
generally make sense of the chemical world. Biology and chemistry converge in
biochemistry, which is crucial to understanding the many complex factors and
processes that keep living organisms alive. Chemical engineering, materials science,
and nanotechnology combine chemical principles and empirical findings to
produce useful substances, ranging from gasoline to fabrics to electronics.
Agriculture, food science, veterinary science, and brewing and wine making help
provide sustenance in the form of food and drink to the world’s population.
Medicine, pharmacology, biotechnology, and botany identify and produce
substances that help keep us healthy. Environmental science, geology,
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oceanography, and atmospheric science incorporate many chemical ideas to help
us better understand and protect our physical world. Chemical ideas are used to
help understand the universe in astronomy and cosmology.
From The Significance of Chemistry to Man in
the Modern
World by Linus Pauling, pp. 10-11.

I. GUIDED COMMENTARY QUESTIONS: Read the text above and write the
answers of these questions. Do not copy long passages of the text. Just give the
relevant elements of the answers.
1. What shows in the text that science is very important?
2. How can science contribute, according to the text, to relieve the dangerous
situation in the world?
3. What difference is there between a scientific fact and a non-scientific fact,
according to the text?

4. What in the text proves that Chemistry at the center of all the sciences. Give
your answer very briefly.
II. SUMMARIZING: The text above is composed of 1,055 words. Please make a
summary of it between 300 and 310 words. Make sure that you pointed out the
relevant ideas of the text.
III. TOPIC OF ESSAY WRITING
Instruction: Describe the picture/diagram below in a coherent paragraph of 200-
210 words. Make sure that you used scientific English in your description. Start by
making on the topic sentence and supporting ideas. Then, organize the work into
a coherent paragraph.