Тема Environmental protection - Английский язык

The 20th century began slowly, to the ticking of grandfather clocks and the stately rhythms of progress. Thanks to science, industry and moral philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, determined by natural law.

And everybody thought that the development would continue in the small steps that had marked the progress of the 19th century. Inventions like the railroad or the telegraph or the typewriter had enabled people to get on with their ordinary lives a little more conveniently. No one could have guessed then that, in the century just beginning, new ideas would burst upon the world with a force and frequency that would turn this stately march of progress into a long distance, free-for-all sprint. Thrust into this race, the children of the 20th century would witness more change in their daily existence and environment than anyone else who had ever walked the planet.

This high-velocity attack of new ideas and technologies seemed to ratify older dreams of a perfectible life on earth, of an existence in which the shocks of nature had been tamed. But the unleashing of unparalleled progress was also accompanied by something quite different: a massive regression toward savagery. If technology endowed humans with Promethean aspirations and powers, it also gave them the means to exterminate one another. Assassinations in Sarajevo in 1914 lit a spark that set off an ... остальная часть текста, формулы, таблицы, изображения скрыты