Task 5 Directions: The following is a
preface of a book. After reading it, you should give brief answers to the 5
questions (No. 56 through No. 60) that follow. The answers should be no
more than 3 words. They should be written after the corresponding numbers on the
Answer Sheet.
This practice book is intended for foreign engineers or
students of engineering who have already mastered the elements of English, and
who now want to use their knowledge of the language to read books on their own
subjects. Readers should understand, however, that the purpose of the book is to
teach language, not to teach engineering. The language in which
scientific and technical facts are expressed is certainly not a different
language from that of everyday life, but all the same it presents the foreign
student with a number of special problems. The most obvious and the most widely
recognized of these problems is the vocabulary. One of the aims of this practice
book is to present as many technical words as possible, and as often as possible
: words such as work and pain and load and feed and force. Words like these look
harmless, but they can cause a lot of trouble to the student.
But more than anything else, I have tried to describe the technical
statement; that is, the completed sentence rather than the individual word. Many
of the structures illustrated in the book are essential to the expression of
technical facts and ideas-at least for the present. What’s the purpose of the book
It is to __________.