Reading Comprehension (1st Course)

Read the text and choose ONLY TRUE sentences:

Computers are about to take people to places they have never been able to visit before, including the surface of other planets. Such a trip will be an illusion, but one that comes closer to real life than anything on stage or screen. Artificial worlds are being built up in a computer memory so that people can walk through at will, look around, and even touch objects.

The system is called virtual reality, so called from the mathematical concept of an image that has the virtues of a real object without the substance.

Virtual reality systems are being developed throughout the world for a range of uses including enabling people to walk “inside” nuclear power stations while controlling a robot that actually goes into an area in which no human could live, and conducting architects through a computer-generated building before it is constructed.

British scientists have a world lead in virtual reality, despite the fortunes being poured into research by Japanese and American companies, which see it as a technology for the next century.

In Britain, Robert Stone, of the National Advanced Robotics Research Centre at Manchester University, is developing systems that could put men on Mars without shooting them into space and could plunge divers under the North Sea without taking them out of the office.

A virtual reality system consists of a helmet with a colour display in front of each eye, and wide-angle lenses to cover the entire field of view and give a stereoscopic effect. The helmet contains sensors, rather like electronic compasses, to record where it is pointing. A computer calculates what the wearer should be seeing in that direction and displays it on the screen.

In more advanced systems, the operator wears an electronic glove that detects exactly what the fingers are doing and transmits the information to the computer. If the user tries to pick up something, the computer will make the object follow the hand to give the illusion of carrying it.

Read the text and choose ONLY FALSE sentences:

Computers are about to take people to places they have never been able to visit before, including the surface of other planets. Such a trip will be an illusion, but one that comes closer to real life than anything on stage or screen. Artificial worlds are being built up in a computer memory so that people can walk through at will, look around, and even touch objects.

The system is called virtual reality, so called from the mathematical concept of an image that has the virtues of a real object without the substance.

Virtual reality systems are being developed throughout the world for a range of uses including enabling people to walk “inside” nuclear power stations while controlling a robot that actually goes into an area in which no human could live, and conducting architects through a computer-generated building before it is constructed.

British scientists have a world lead in virtual reality, despite the fortunes being poured into research by Japanese and American companies, which see it as a technology for the next century.

In Britain, Robert Stone, of the National Advanced Robotics Research Centre at Manchester University, is developing systems that could put men on Mars without shooting them into space and could plunge divers under the North Sea without taking them out of the office.

A virtual reality system consists of a helmet with a colour display in front of each eye, and wide-angle lenses to cover the entire field of view and give a stereoscopic effect. The helmet contains sensors, rather like electronic compasses, to record where it is pointing. A computer calculates what the wearer should be seeing in that direction and displays it on the screen.

In more advanced systems, the operator wears an electronic glove that detects exactly what the fingers are doing and transmits the information to the computer. If the user tries to pick up something, the computer will make the object follow the hand to give the illusion of carrying it.

Choose the correct answer:

The term virtual reality is taken from...