Solutions Intermediate. Unit 5 (Technology) Progress Test

1. Danny’s meeting us in the park. We ________________ text messages earlier today.

1. Who were you ________________ a conversation with in the park?

1. I read all of Katy Perry and Rihanna’s tweets. Who do you ________________ Twitter?

It’s a very difficult maths problem, but our teacher has given us three days to ________________ an answer.

Match to make collocations

The common ¹____________ in the photos is technology, namely smartwatches. In the ²____________ photo there is a woman on a train who is looking at her watch, ³____________ in the second photo there are two men jogging and wearing smartwatches. The woman looks ⁴____________ she is on her way to work and checking her emails. It looks to me ⁵____________ if she’s just had a notification of a new message and is looking to see who the sender is. She is holding a book but her attention is directed at the small screen on her wrist. In the second photo the men are running, ⁶____________ than looking at their watches. It doesn’t look to me as ⁷____________ they’re interested in anything apart from their sport. In my ⁸____________, athletes wear smartwatches to check their performance, such as counting their steps or their heart rates, and not to stay connected with work. They don’t ⁹____________ stressed or like they need to be checking their phones every two minutes. For me, the important ¹⁰____________ is that we should all have periods of time when we are unconnected from our studies or work, and just use technology for leisure.

Maybe Suzie didn’t see your text message

I’m sure Simon didn’t win the race because he isn’t a good runner.

It’s possible that Jan and Liam have gone into town.

__________ it was very dark outside, we managed to find the keys that she had dropped into the grass.

1. Match the quotes with the words below.

camcorder drama geography I.C.T. R.E. smartwatch

1. Of course, Mecca was much smaller in the time of Mohammed.     

2. Remember, there has been a murder in this play. So pretend to be worried and sad.      

3. It’s my favourite lesson because we learn how to write programs.       

4. Because you wear it all the time, you can always check the internet.           

5. Over time, rivers cut through the land and make deep valleys, like the Grand Canyon.          

6. Come on, smile! I’m filming you.          

Read the text and answer the questions.

In the past, technology and progress was very slow. People ‘invented’ farming 12,000 years ago, but it took 8,000 years for the idea to go around the world. Then, about 3,500 years ago, people called ‘potters’ used round wheels to turn and make plates. But it took hundreds of years before some clever person thought, ‘if we join two wheels together and make them bigger, we can use them to move things’.

In the last few centuries, things have begun to move faster. Take a 20th-century invention like the aeroplane, for example. The first aeroplane flight on 17 December 1903 only lasted 12 seconds, and the plane only went 37 metres. It can’t have been very exciting to watch, but that flight changed the world. Sixteen years later, the first plane flew across the Atlantic, and only fifty years after that, men walked on the moon. Technology is now changing our world faster and faster. So what will the future bring?

One of the first changes will be the materials we use. Scientists have just invented an amazing new material called graphene, and soon we will use it to do lots of things. With graphene batteries in your mobile, it will take a few seconds to charge your phone or download a thousand gigabytes of information! Today, we make most products in factories, but in the future, scientists will invent living materials. Then we won’t make things like cars and furniture in factories − we will grow them!

Thirty years ago, people couldn’t have imagined social media like Twitter and Facebook. Now we can’t live without them. But this is only the start. Right now, scientists are putting microchips in some disabled people’s brains, to help them see, hear and communicate better. In the future, we may all use these technologies. We won’t need smartphones to use social media or search the internet because the internet will be in our heads!

More people will go into space in the future, too. Space tourism has already begun, and a hundred years from now, there may be many hotels in space. One day, we may get most of our energy from space too. In 1941, the writer Isaac Asimov wrote about a solar power station in space. People laughed at his idea then, but we should have listened to him. Today, many people are trying to develop a space solar power station. After all, the sun always shines above the clouds!

The writer says that in the past                                        [people didn’t want to change the world, here weren’t many clever people., nobody invented anything., progress wasn’t as fast as it is now.]

What does the writer say about aeroplanes?                                      [The first planes weren’t a success., They changed transport very quickly., They didn’t carry many people.]

Graphene will help us to                               [make things in factories, grow things in our gardens., produce new materials., get information more quickly.]

The best title for the article would be:                                  [The history of science, From aeroplanes to space travel, Predictions for the next century, The speed of change]