Unit 8 Culture

1 Find words in the text that mean:

1 a piece of equipment made for a particular purpose
(paragraph A)
2 thin metal that is used to carry an electric current or
signal (paragraph A)
3 that can be moved or carried easily (paragraph B)

4 said as an answer (paragraph B)

5 put electricity into something (paragraph C)

2 Read the text and write true or false for sentences 1–5.
Correct the false sentences.
1 Martin Cooper didn’t like Star Trek.

The communicator

A In the early 1970s, Martin Cooper, an engineer at 2 It took three months to turn Martin Cooper’s idea into
the electronics company Motorola, used to relax reality.
in the evening by watching a TV programme, Star
Trek. Star Trek was a science fiction series about
a spaceship that explored the universe. Although
3 Joel Engel worked with Martin Cooper.
Cooper enjoyed watching Star Trek, he was more
interested in the spaceship captain’s ‘communicator’.
The ‘communicator’ was a small device that the
captain spoke into and it did not have any wires. 4 Martin Cooper explained that Star Trek had influenced
Watching the captain use it, Cooper had an idea that his invention of the mobile phone.
was going to revolutionize world communications: the
mobile phone.

B After working on the idea for 90 days in the 5 The first mobile phone batteries ran out quickly.
laboratory, Motorola chose 3 April 1973 as the day to
introduce the world to Cooper’s invention. Motorola
invited the media to watch Cooper make the world’s
first mobile phone call from Sixth Avenue in New York. 3 Read the text again and answer the questions. Use your
The man who received the call was Joel Engel. Engel own words and complete sentences.
was an engineer at a rival company, Bell Labs, and he 1 What type of programme was Star Trek?
had also been working on a mobile phone project.
Cooper told Engel that he was calling him from a real,

handheld, portable phone. Nobody knows what Engel
replied, but he must have been slightly annoyed at the 2 What are the similarities between the ‘communicator’
and a mobile phone?
very least!

C After the demonstration, Cooper told journalists
that watching Star Trek had helped him to invent 3 What is special about 3 April 1973?
the mobile phone. However, it was quite a few years

before people were able to buy phones as small as
the Star Trek captain’s ‘communicator’. The phone
that Cooper had spoken on, a Motorola DynaTAC, was 4 Why do you think Joel Engel might have been annoyed?
23 centimetres long, weighed 1.13 kilograms and had
a battery that needed to be charged for ten hours
so you could speak for 35 minutes. Not surprisingly,
5 Why did mobile phones not become popular immediately?
it wasn’t until the 1990s that mobile phones became
really popular, when their size and weight had been
reduced considerably.

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