I. Answer these multiple-choice questions to see how well you understood the reading

OASES IN SPACE

The International Space Station (ISS) is the most complicated international scientific project ever undertaken. First proposed in 1984, it involves the effort of sixteen nations: the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, eleven nations of the European Space Agency, and Brazil. The first component of the ISS, Zahra (sunrise in Russian), was launched into orbit in 1998. A few weeks later, the crew of a U.S. space shuttle brought the second piece, Unity, and connected the two. The launch of the third major component, the Russian Zvezda («star»), was postponed by financial problems until July 2000, and the station's first crew arrived in November. Eventually, the ISS will contain more than 100 parts and will require forty-four spaceflights to deliver them. A total of 160 spacewalks will be needed to assemble the components. The ISS was originally scheduled to be completed in 2006, although unexpected events such as the Columbia space shuttle tragedy of 2003 may delay that date. When work is finished, the station will house a full-time crew of seven astronauts and scientists and contain six scientific laboratories. With an anticipated lifetime of 10 years after completion, the ISS is not only the most complicated scientific project ever undertaken but also, at a projected cost of $35 billion to $50 billion, one of the most expensive.

The ISS is not the first space station. That distinction belongs to the Soviet Union's Salyut 1. Salyut 1 was sent into orbit in 1971 but suffered setbacks. The first crew to arrive was unable to get in: There was something wrong with the hatch! The second crew, equipped with special tools, got in and spent 24 days there. However, on the way back to Earth, a tragedy occurred. A valve had opened by mistake and let all the air out of the capsule, and the three cosmonauts, who were not wearing space suits, died during the descent. In all, there were six successful Salyut stations. They can be seen in science fiction movies. There is a memorable scene in Stanley Kubrick's film 2007; a Space Odyssey (1969) in which a shuttle rocket gracefully docks with a space first – and only – American space station, Skylab, was launched in 1973. To save money, the Americans used the third stage of a Saturn V booster rocket left over from the Apollo moon missions, and so Skylab was much roomier than the Soviet stations. Three crews spent time on Skylab, but the station had to be abandoned in 1975 because there was simply no way to get to it. The United States had used up its Apollo rockets and the first space shuttle wouldn't be launched until 1981. Eventually, Skylab's orbit decayed, and the station fell to Earth in 1979. At the time, some people feared that the debris might land in an inhabited area, and a few people even built «Skylab shelters». However, there was no reason to panic; Skylab burned up harmlessly over Australia. In 1986, the Soviet Union launched another station, Mir («peace»). Although damaged by an on-board fire and a collision with a supply rocket, Mir stayed in orbit for 15 years, and both U.S. and Russian crewmen, who would later serve on the ISS, trained on Mir.

The ISS and earlier space stations are a far cry from the space stations described by science fiction writers and dreamers, and even by scientists earlier in the century. After World War II, many German rocket scientists who had worked on weapons programs immigrated to the United States and the Soviet Union. Werner von Braun, the most famous of these scientists, played a vital role in the early days of the U.S. space program. It was von Braun who decided that a large space station was essential to the exploration of space, a first step that would provide a stopping place on the way to the moon and the planets. In the March 1952 edition of Collier's Magazine, von Braun contributed an article about the proposed station and introduced the idea of a wheel-shaped design. Illustrated by the artist Charles Bonestell, this issue popularized the «spinning wheel» or «donut in the sky» design for space ships, which soon became the public's idea of what a space station should look like. Arthur C. Clarke's collection of stories Islands in the Sky (1952) and Murray Leinster's novel Platform in Space (1953) were set on fictional space stations of this kind. Wheel- shaped stations were also featuredstation to the accompaniment of The Blue Danube Waltz. The popular television series Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 both featured wheel-shaped space stations.

NASA began focusing attention on space station design in the mid-1970s. In 1975, a series of studies conducted at Stanford University proposed that clusters of massive space stations, each capable of housing large populations, be constructed at the Lagrange points. These are the five points in space where the moon's gravity and the Earth's gravity are counterbalanced. A space station placed at a Lagrange point is not pulled toward the Earth or the moon. Unlike the International Space Station, a Lagrange station does not require boosting by rocket engines to stay in orbit. These huge stations were to be built to last for hundreds of years. According to the studies, the materials needed to build the station could be mined from the moon. Gigantic magnetic catapults on the moon could then hurl the millions of components out to the Lagrange points. To pay for the station's construction and upkeep, solar panels could collect energy from the sun and, for a price, send it by tight-beam microwaves back to Earth. The stations would contain residential, industrial, and agricultural zones. The inhabitants of the colonies would include not just engineers and astronauts but also farmers, factory workers, teachers, erchants, doctors, artists, and people of every occupation. A scientist named Gerald O'Neill wrote a popular book called High Frontier in 1975 to promote Lagrange stations, and an international group, the L-5 Society, named after one of the Lagrange points, was formed to encourage governments to build Lagrange stations.

Several types of Lagrange stations were designed by the United States. Island 3, also known as the Sunflower Design or the O'Neill Cylinder, was the most ambitious design. It consisted of a huge cylindrical structure 36 kilometers long and 6.3 kilometers in diameter. The interior surface of the cylinder could be landscaped with features such as lakes, waterfalls, forests, and mountains. It could house up to a million inhabitants who would live in towns and villages set in a parklike environment. The cylinder would spin on its axis, creating «gravity», and it would be so large that it would generate its own weather. Inhabitants and tourists could enjoy such unique recreational opportunities as zero-gravity «flying» at the center of the cylinder.

Within a decade, government enthusiasm for the Lagrange stations vanished. NASA no longer had enough money to undertake projects this ambitious. As the energy crisis of the 1970s eased, the prime reason for no building such stations – to provide a cheap, dependable supply of energy from space – no longer seemed so urgent. Space engineers began to focus their attention on more modest projects, such as the ISS. But interest in immense space stations has never completely died. As their continued appearance in science fiction movies shows, these «oases in space» still seem to have a firm grip on people's imagination.

Exercises

I. Answer these multiple-choice questions to see how well you understood the reading.

1. Which statement best describes the order in which the first three ISS components were launched?

(A) Zvezda-Zahra-Unity

(B) Unity-Zahra-Zvezda

(C) Zahra-Unity-Zvezda

(D) Zakra-Zvezda-Unity

2. How many spacewalks will be needed to assemble the ISS?

(A) 7

(B) 44

(C) 110

(D) 160

3. Why did Skylab have to be abandoned?

(A) Because of a fire aboard the space station

(B) Because there was no way to transport crews to the space station

(C) Because the entrance to the space station could not be opened

(D) Because it was going to come out of orbit in a few weeks

4. If the original schedule is followed, how long will the ISS probably remain useful?

(A) Until 2006

(B) Until 2010

(C) Until 2016

(D) Until 2100

5. Who drew the space station on the cover of the March 1952 edition of Colliers Magazine?

(A) Charles Bonestell

(B) Arthur C. Clarke

(C) Werner von Braun

(D) Stanley Kubrick

6. Which of these terms is NOT a name for the most ambitious type of Lagrange station?

(A) Island 3

(B) Sunflower design

(C) L-5

(D) O'Neill cylinder

7. Which of the following would probably NOT be true about Island 3 Lagrange stations?

(A) Tourists from earth might visit them.

(B) They would depend on Earth for all their food.

(C) People could «fly» through their centers where there was no gravity.

(D) Because of their size, they might actually create their own weather.

8. What point about immense space stations is made in the last paragraph?

(A) They will almost certainly be built one day.

(B) They continue to hold people's interest.

(C) They are not as useful as smaller stations.

(D) They are still being planned.

THE NAME GAME

Each year, business executives around the world struggle to find original and catchy names for their companies and their companies' products. According to business experts, these decisions are among the most important decisions that firms ever make. A name is the first point of contact that a company has with the world, and it can be an effective marketing tool. And respected names have value. When a company is sold, there is often a fee for transferring the company name to the new owners. The rights to the names Indian Motorcycles and Pan Am Airlines were sold years after those companies went bankrupt. Names are so important that some companies hire special naming firms that develop a list of names, test them at focus groups, screen them to be sure they are available, and then trademark the final selections. How do firms decide on names? Here are a few of the ways companies play the name game:

Some companies choose straightforward names. These may include the name or names of the founders (Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett Packard), the place where they first did business (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Mutual of New York), or their primary products (General Electric, General Motors). To make a straightforward name memorable, though, is a challenge.

Some companies are mainly identified by initials. International Business Machines is almost universally called IBM, American Telephone and Telegraph has become AT&T, and Kentucky Fried Chicken has consciously chosen to be known as KFC. In some cases, though, it is not exactly clear what the initials stand for. The computer company NBI's initials stand for «Nothing But Initials». Or take the case of IKEA, the Swedish design firm: The initials IK come from the name of the founder, Ingvar Komrat. The E comes from the name of his family farm, Elmtaryd, and the A comes from the nearby town of Agunnaryd. Some firms create names by a process called «morpheme construction», first shortening and then fusing parts of the company's full names. For example, United Information Systems is generally referred to as Unisys and Federal Express as FedEx. FedEx saved money with its new name too: the shorter name cost $1,000 less to paint on each of the company's 10,000 trucks. Some companies use unusual spellings of common names: Cingular for Singular, Citibank for City Bank, and Sunkist for Sun Kissed.

Some companies choose names that are inspired by other company names. According to the founder of the Carnation evaporated-milk company, the name for his product was suggested, strangely enough, by a brand of cigars known as Carnations. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, was a Beatles fan, and he named his company after Apple Records, the label founded by the Beatles. This «borrowing» is perfectly legal as long as the two companies are not in the same line of business. (Reportedly, Steve Jobs had to sign an agreement not to produce records.) However, in some cases, company lawyers have said that use of their name, or even part of their name, results in «dilution» of the strength of that name, and they have sued other companies to prevent this. Toys-R-Us, for example, has tried to protect the «R-Us» portion of their name even when it has been applied to completely different products, such as cheese or flowers or guns, and McDonald's has tried to prevent companies from using the «Mc» prefix that has been used for many of their products.

Some firms have chosen names that have nothing to do with their business. Apple is not in the fruit business; it makes computers. Red Pepper does not sell spices; it sells software. Domino's has nothing to do with games; it makes pizza. A number of companies have chosen off-the-wall or playful names for their products. There are those naming experts who warn against this, saying that consumers will not take these seriously, and in the case of Boo.com, they may have been right: This women's fashion company went bankrupt in no time. However, Monster.com, Google, and Yahoo! have succeeded despite or maybe because of their unusual names.

Some corporations have turned to other languages for names. A company or product name may come from Latin (Aquafina bottled water, Avis car rentals, Volvo automobiles) or Greek (Amphion multimedia, Oreo cookies), Spanish (El Polio Loco fast food restaurants, Fuego technology), Danish (Haagen-Dazs ice cream), or Hawaiian (Akamai internet technology). Other companies borrow from mythology: Nike shoes, Ajax cleanser, and Midas mufflers are all named after figures in classical myths.

Some names are totally invented. One advantage for a corporation in making up a name is that this name is then the unambiguous property of the company, and it is easy to trademark. Some of these coined names, while not real words, are suggestive of actual words. For example, Nyquil, a brand of cough medicine meant to be taken at night, suggests the words night and tranquil. Aleve, a pain medicine, is reminiscent of the word relieve, and Acura is similar to the word accurate. Other coined names are completely meaningless: Exxon, Kodak, Xerox, and SONY are examples of successful names of this type. Not all coined names are well liked. The famed entrepreneur Donald Trump once said that the corporate name Allegis sounded like «a world class disease». That's because the names of so many diseases – arthritis, gingivitis, encephalitis – end in -is.

Choosing good names becomes more difficult when a firm markets internationally. Today, through the Internet, even small businesses often do business in several countries. Sometimes the leap from one language to another can be positive; the Chinese pictogram for the sounds of the name Coca-Cola contains the words for «delicious» and «leisure». More often, though, a problem occurs. The classic example of an international naming gaffe is that of the General Motors car called the Nova. Named for an exploding star, the Nova was a reliable car, but its sales were never brisk in Spanish-speaking countries. This was supposedly because Nova could be read as no va in Spanish, meaning «It does not go». In German, the word mist means dirt or manure, so Country Mist makeup and the nasal spray Primatene Mist had to be renamed for the German market. A food company literally made a big mistake when it named a burrito Burrada. (Burrada means «big mistake» is Spanish.) Bran Buds, a type of breakfast cereal, sounds like «burnt farmers» in Swedish, and the word Dainty, the name of a type of soap, sounds like the word for «aloof» in Finnish and like the word for «stupid» in Farsi. Firms and products from English-speaking countries are not the only ones with problematic names: Bimbo bread from Spain, Zif soft drinks from Greece, Creap coffee creamer from Japan, Swine chocolates from China, and Pocari Sweat sports drink from Japan may do well in their regional markets, but would probably not be very successful in English-speaking countries. The name of the Japanese computer maker Toshiba sounds like «tou-chu-ba» to speakers of Mandarin Chinese. This phrase means «Let's steal it». The lessons from naming mix-ups is that global marketers must do their homework. They must make sure that the names they choose are easy to pronounce and that they do not have any negative linguistic or cultural meanings in the target language. For large international businesses – in fact, for any company of any size – playing the name game is a serious business.

Exercises

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