Warming-up.

What is the Internet?

How popular is it these days? Who uses it?

What's your favourite website? Why do you like it?

What sort of information can be found on the Internet?

What else can be found there?

How do you look for information on the Internet?

Can you always rely on the information you find?

What are the positives and negatives of the Internet?

How do people get connected to the Internet?

Is it difficult to publish something on the Internet?

Do you (or anyone you know) have a website? What is it about?

Do you think that the Internet will replace other kinds of mass media completely? Why?

Is the Internet only used for legal purposes?

When you are using the internet, is your privacy well protected?

Is there a lot of unpleasant advertisement on the Internet?

     Read the following text. What are the major problems dealing with the Internet?

     Make sure you understand the meaning of the following words and word-combinations:

to embrace Internet users

to stay in touch with each other

packet-switching network

host computers

to have access to Internet

to be knocked down

expensive communications systems

commercial users

Internet providers

local service providers

to pay an hourly fee

to cover costs

to increase drastically

to transmit information over Internet

computer-aided-design specialists

encoding programs

to conduct transactions

The Internet

Modern life has become easier and the people of the world have to thanks to the immense contribution of the internet technology to communication and information sharing. There is no doubt that internet has made our life become easier and more convenient. We can use internet to communicate with people around the world, doing business by using internet, make new friend and know different cultures, searching information, studying and etc.

The internet not only allows for communication through email but also ensures easy availability of information, images, and products amongst other things. Every day the internet continues to provide a new facility, something new that is immensely convenient and that makes life more easier for web users. The Internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of users all over the world, began in the United States in 1969 as a military experiment. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packed switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion, for example), information will just route around them. One such packet-switching network already survived a war. It was the Iraqi computer which was not knocked out during the Gulf War.

Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50 %) are in the United States, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions, and their number is growing by thousands each month worldwide.

The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET News, using the World-Wide Web, telnet, FTP, and Gopher.

In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunications systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate over the Internet with the rest of the world and can do it very cheaply. When they send e-mail messages, they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays for sending e-mail messages over the Internet long distances, around the world? The answer is very simple: a user pays his/her service provider a monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its costs to connect to a larger service provider. And part of the fee got by the larger provider goes to cover its cost of running a worldwide network of fires and wireless stations.

But saving money is only the first step. If people see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of this network will drastically increase. For example, some western architecture companies and garment centers already transmit their basic designs and concepts over the Internet into China, where they are reworked and refined by skilled – but expensive – Chinese computer-aided-design specialists.

However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data is constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. Because of this, it is possible to get into any of computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. In spite of the fact there are many strong encoding programs available, nearly all the information being sent over the Internet is transmitted without and from of encoding, i.e. “in the clear”. But when it becomes necessary to send important information over the network, these encoding programs may be useful. Some American banks and companies conduct transactions over the Internet. However, there are still both commercial and technical problems which will take time to be resolved.

Questions to discuss:

1. How much time do you spend on the Internet?
2. What are some of the benefits of the Internet?
3. What are some of the dangers of the Internet?
4. How much time should children spend on the Internet?
5. How has the Internet changed the world?
6. What will the Internet be like in 10 years?
7. Are you part of any social networks like Facebook or Google+?
8. When did you get your first email address?
9. What is your favorite website?
10. Should the Internet be regulated or censored?
11. Talk about how technology has changed in your lifetime.
12. What do you think has been the most important new invention in the last 100 years?
13. Are there any new gadgets that you really want to get?
14. What do you think will be the next biggest technological advance?
15. How can countries help to create more inventors?
16. What is your favorite piece of technology you own?
17. How will computers change in the future?
18. Do you think that there will be more or less new innovation in the future?
19. Is there a piece of technology that you really want that doesn’t exist? (i.e. flying cars, teleportation, etc.)
20. Give some examples of technology that have made the world worse.
21. What do you think is the most important thing that humans have created?
22. Do you think that people will travel outside of our solar system? How will they get there?
23. Do you like new gadgets or do you prefer to use technology you are comfortable with?
24. What are the possibilities of technology in clothing?
25. What is the future of transportation?