Name the main milestones that contributed to the formation of the current image of the University. Show how the University today is different from the University we had a hundred years ago.

2) Point out important discoveries, made at MPSU in the past 145 years. Can you add more discoveries to the ones mentioned in the text?

3) Speak about famous people who graduated from MPSU.

4) Touch upon vital facts concerning students’ accommodation. Add information you consider important to know for a new student.

5) Speak about five things most important for you when you were choosing MPSU (e.g. it offers high-quality teaching and teaching staff are highly qualified; scholarships; high volume of face-to-face teaching hours; it is well ranked; it is welcoming for international students; you have friends or family who have been to that university; it has up-to-date technology and online learning options; it has a high graduate employment rate; it has affordable university-owned accommodation; it has good career service and collaboration with employers; it allows to make friends with people from different countries; the university responds quickly to my enquiries).

6) Explain why MPSU is the right choice for you.

 

 

Lesson 2. MPSU in numbers. Professor Vladimir Vernadsky and his legacy

v Task 2.1. Speaking. What do you know about MPSU in absolute numbers? Working in pairs, ask each other questions and answer them. Student A, use information on this page to answer the questions of your mate and ask him/her for the missing information. Student B, do the same, using your worksheet on page … Together, make comparisons of numbers of different categories of students, teachers, numbers of various buildings etc. (Revise if necessary degrees of comparison of adjectives).

Note: Specific statements usually contain reference to data, while general statements do not. Examples are as follows:

Far fewer master degree programmes as opposed to postgraduate programmes are offered at the university, 25 and 69 respectively. (specific statement)

We can see that there are considerable differences in the proportion of the academic/teaching staff (general statement)

Student A

MPSU is:

A. 25 269 students from __ regions of Russia

B. ___ foreign students from 87 countries

C. 141 post-graduate students

D. ____ teachers

E. ___ Candidates of Science

F. 350 Professors

G. ___ Doctors of Science

H. 17 Institutes and Departments

I. ___ training and research centres

J. 59 research schools

K. ___ research centres

L. 7 dormitories

M. ___ University buildings

N. 38 Bachelor Degree subject areas

O. ___ Master Degree subject areas

P. 69 PhD subject areas

 

Student B.

MPSU is:

A. 25 269 students from 75 regions of Russia

B. 2320 foreign students from __ countries

C. ____ postgraduate students

D. 1746 teachers

E. 888 Candidates of Science

F. ___ Professors

G. 365 Doctors of Science

H. ___ Institutes and Departments

I. 12 training and research centres

J. ___ research schools

K. 10 research centres

L. ____ dormitories

M. 18 University buildings

N. ___ Bachelor Degree subject areas

O. 25 Master degree subject areas

P. ___ PhD subject areas

v Task 2.2. Reading.

< -- Image 13 -- >

A. Look at this portrait. Do you know this person? Exchange with your partner facts each of you can remember about this man.

B. Read the following text about one of the greatest Russian scientists and thinkers, who once used to be a lecturer at Higher Women’s Courses. The text has jumbled paragraphs. Your task is to order them correctly.

1. Having returned to Russia, Vernadsky accepted a professor position (1898) and later worked as vice rector of Moscow University. At the same time, he taught at Moscow Higher Courses for Women. He resigned in 1911 in protest over the government's reactionary policies, having built up one of the best-equipped laboratories in the world. After the February revolution of 1917, he served on several commissions of agriculture and education of the provisional government, including as assistant minister of education.

2. Vernadsky died on January 6, 1945, aged 81, in Moscow. Among his disciples were dozens of famous scientists. Numerous scientific institutions, geographical objects and streets, as well as a mineral, a species of algae and a moon crater, were named in his honour.

3. Vernadsky first popularized the concept of the noosphere (“the sphere of human thought”) and deepened the idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word 'biosphere' was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911.

4. In 1887Vernadsky married Natalia Starytska; their son George Vernadsky (1887–1973) emigrated to the United States where he published numerous books on medieval and modern Russian history, and their daughter Nina Toll became an American doctor-psychiatrist.

5. Vernadsky expressed the interest to natural sciences since childhood. Vernadsky graduated from Saint Petersburg State University in 1885. As the position of mineralogist in Saint Petersburg State University was vacant, and VasilyDokuchaev (the founder of soil science), and Alexey Pavlov, a geologist, had been teaching Mineralogy for a while, Vernadsky chose to enter Mineralogy.

6. Vladimir IvanovichVernadsky was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, on 12 March 1863 in the family of the Russian-Ukrainian economist and professorIvan Vernadsky and music instructor Hanna Konstantynovych. His second cousin was Vladimir Korolenko, a renowned Russian writer. Vernadsky spent his childhood and went to school in Ukraine, but returned to Saint-Petersburg with his family to continue his education.

7. In the late 1930s and early 1940sVernadsky played an early advisory role in the Soviet atomic bomb project, as one of the most forceful voices arguing for the exploitation of nuclear power, the surveying of Soviet uranium sources, and having nuclear fission research conducted at his Radium Institute. He died, however, before a full project was pursued.

8. Vernadsky’s theory was not widely accepted in the West. However, he was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. During the 1920s, he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planets as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was an important pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences. His most famous book, “Biosfera”, was written during the flee to Paris after the Revolution and published in 1926. He also worked with the Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, and they published two works together, “The living Matter in Biosphere” and “Human Autotrophy”.

9. In Vernadsky’s theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along.

10. In addition, Vernadsky was a renowned Russian crystallographer, mineralogist, geochemist and geologist and laid out the foundation for the study of geochemistry and biogeochemistry, and took part in various expeditions.

11. Vernadsky was a member of the Russian and Soviet Academies of Sciencessince 1912 and a founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciencesin Kiev, Ukraine (1918). He was a founder of the National Library of Ukrainian State and worked closely with the Tavrida University in Crimea.

12. While trying to find a topic for his doctorate, he first went to Naples to study under crystallographerArcangeloScacchi, and then to Germany to study under Paul Groth, who had developed a machine to study the optical,thermal,elastic,magneticand electricalproperties of crystals.

 

v Task 2.3. Vocabulary work. Focus on terms. Search the net and find out more about the terms below. Sum up the key things about each and enter them into the blanks. Exchange your results with the groupmates and discuss the results:

1. Chrystallography ________________________

2. Minerology ____________________________

3. Geochemistry __________________________

4. Biogeochemistry _______________________

5. Biosphere _____________________________

6. Geosphere _____________________________

7. Cognition _____________________________

8. Noosphere _______________________________

9. Nuclear fission _____________________________

Writing skills

Summary

 

v Task 2.4. Write a one-paragraph summary of the text.