Language skills Extras Explore 12 Thinking about the future 165 TechNews, an English-language magazine, has invited readers to submit articles predicting the future. You decide to write one. Think about, for example: ■■ the automotive industry ■■ materials science ■■ television ■■ robots ■■ transport and travel ■■ the media and information exchange In your article, you should: ■■ describe the current situation in the field(s) you have chosen. ■■ suggest new future developments. ■■ speculate about their impact on people’s everyday lives. Give your article a title. Use expressions from 6 and 7 and write around 250 words. 1 Writing guide: Article, p. 191. In small groups, compare your predictions and give reasons for them. Choose the two predictions you think are most likely to come true, and the two that are least likely. Tell the other groups which predictions you chose and why. As a class, decide which are the two most and two least likely predictions. Future transport Look at the picture. What do you think it shows? Read the introduction to the article. Answer the questions in pairs. 1 What is a ‘drone’? 2 How could using this means of transport affect our lives? Make three predictions. Now read the rest of the article. 1 What could be the advantages of flying cars? 3 Why might it take many more years for 2 What could our future transportation network look like? flying cars to be in everyday use? Writing 8 Speaking 9 a b Reading 10 11 a b The idea of having a part car, part plane, part drone parked outside your home may not be as farfetched as it seems. There really aren’t any technological hurdles to this. We are going to have personal air vehicles that are both cars and planes, at least that’s Missy Cummings’s vision of the future. It’s basically the fusion of a drone with a robotic car, so that your plane is also your car, but the big leap in technology is that you are not actually driving either, says the Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Drones have a negative connotation in the media, says Cummings, because they are essentially seen as spy cameras. But most people don’t realise that when they are on a plane, they are effectively travelling on a drone. The fly-by-wire technology that exists on all Airbus and many Boeing aircraft is the exact same technology that exists on drones. The reason why drones are the answer to the future is that, in all honesty, we are terrible drivers. Humans inherently have a half-second delay in almost any situation needing a quick response, like a ball rolling out in a street, where we have to take evasive action. Even a half-second delay can mean the difference between life and death, and computers and automated systems don’t have that – they have microseconds. So, our transportation network of the future, both on the ground and in the air, will actually be safer when we turn it over to computers. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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