1 D


Refer students to the photographs. Briefly elicit ideas of what they depict.


03


Encourage students to write down their predictions before they listen to Part 3 of the lecture.


Visually feed back the answers.


Answers 1. The two main areas of computing are hardware and software.


2. hardware engineer, software engineer, systems analyst


4. Accept suggestions, but do not comment further at this stage. 03


Part 3


So, let us take this a little further and look at some of the language we have already used to describe key areas of computing. I have mentioned hardware and software. If we look at these words, I’m sure you can see they contain words you already know – hard and soft. These are opposites. I’m sure you can think of things which are hard – for example, stone – and things which are soft – such as fur. We can also see that both hardware and software


end with the same suffix: ~ware. The suffix ~ware is used to describe different types of goods: things that are bought and sold. A warehouse is somewhere goods are stored; and this concept is also used in computing: data warehouse is a phrase used to describe large stores of data. In computing, the words hardware and software began to be used in the late 1940s, when the first digital computers were built. The people building the computers needed words to describe the parts which contained the data and the parts which did the processing. The data was stored on soft paper cards, so these parts became software; and the processing was done by machines made of hard metal, so these became hardware. Over time, hardware and software developed as two distinct areas within computing, and different specialist areas developed within each. For example, people who design electronic circuits within computers are described as hardware engineers. People who design software can be called software engineers, and some will be called systems analysts because they analyze how systems can be improved by computers. There are other words as well. For example, on many computers, the user who has complete control over the


20


1.2 Listening


something happen, for example, we can say that the university will be running new courses next year. In computing, we use the second meaning to describe what happens when we want to make a program work. We run the computer program. So, in both cases, the meaning is very similar: we want something to happen, and we do this by running it.


system is called the root user. In everyday English, root is a word which we use for the part of a plant which provides it with food and support. Without their roots, trees would fall over and die. So, in this way, the root user is the user who has most control over the computer system. They can make any kind of change, such as add or delete users. Other users do not have that type of control. Information is a word which is the same in general


English and in computing, but data is a more specialized word. However, even when we have a specialized word like data, general English can be useful. For example, we saw that we can have different data structures to handle different types of data or information, for example, text, audio or video. The word structure is used in general English to describe the overall shape and design of something, for example, the structure of a house or an aeroplane. So, we can think of data structure as the shape of the data. So, to conclude, I would like you to think about what the word computing itself means and how we can define it.


E Set for pairwork. 1.2_E


Check that students know the meaning of the words and pronounce them so that they know what they sound like.


Ask them to listen for the words in the recording and to note if they are definitions (D) or examples (E).


04


Play the recording. Provide answers as visual feedback.


Answers computing D difference E clay E sequence D electronic calculator E calculate D paper E machine D steps D


04 Part 4


One very common definition of computing is any goal- oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. However, I don’t think this is a very helpful definition because it does not tell us what a computer is. Well, it may help to look at the word computer, which comes to us from the Latin computare, which means


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