A great discovery

One beautiful afternoon during the second part of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was sitting in the shade of a large apple tree, which grew in the garden of his house. He was thinking of the problems of the moon and its motion around the earth.

“What “, Newton was wondering, “makes the moon move around the earth? Is it tied to the earth by an invisible string? It is no great problems to make a stone tied to a string go in a circle. But there is no string connecting the earth and the moon –or is there?”

While Newton was asking himself that question, there was a rustle of leaves and a large red apple fell from the tree to the ground.

“Why do apples fall?” Newton asked himself again. Can it not be that the same force attracting apples to the earth also attracts the moon to it? The earth itself is ever moving around the sun and the planets too. Moreover, they were moving when no man lived on our earth, and they will be moving for millions of years to come. In addition, he understood that the motion of all the planets around the sun is due to the same king of force. So he understood further that such an attracting force is a universal property of matter, acting between any two material bodies.

He was quite right. This was the great discovery of universal gravity, which, combined with other discoveries in the fields of mathematics and physics, made Newton’s name great throughout the world.

Proverb: A tree is known by its fruit.

Задание 2.2

Ответьте на вопросы:

1. Where was Newton sitting when the apple fell to the ground?

2. What fell to the ground when Newton was sitting in the garden?

3. What problem was Newton thinking of while sitting under an apple-tree?

4. What did Newton understand when he saw the falling apple?

5. What made Newton’s name great throughout the world?

6. What is the motion of the planets around the sun due to?

 

Задание 2.3

Перескажите кратко содержание текста “A great discovery”.

TEXT 3 “Archimedes – the great scientist of antiquity”