Divide text 12A into logical parts and give each a suitable title.

18. Fill in the gaps with the words from the box:

Water is one of the crucial 1___ regulating human life and survival. Regions with either complete absence or threatening abundance of water have obliged men 2___ to this challenging environment and fight against acidity or flood. It is no coincidence that exactly in the cradles of the big rivers the first large agricultural 3___ have grown out of this challenging. People were 4___ on the river waters to survive. The human 5___ for water is universal. Rivers are indispensable, 6___ natural elements. The river provides 7___, essential quantities of water and the possibility to travel.

Check your answers on p. 280.

19. Work in pairs, make as many questions as possible to review the contents of the text below and ask each other:

How did Our Water Get So Dirty?

In 1972, the United States legislature passed the Clean Water Act due to a crisis in the nation’s water purity. The purpose of the act was to restore the chemical, biological, and physical nature of our nation’s waterways that had been so damaged by pollution. The goal of the act was that, by 1985, no more pollutants would be discharged into the water supply and all of our nation’s rivers, streams, and lakes would be fishable and swimmable once more.

Every city was required to install a water treatment plant, and every industry was required to use the best available technology to limit the amount of pollutants that entered water sources. Under these stringent demands, water quality began to improve slightly. Still, almost two decades after the year of supposed goal fulfillment, about a third of the nation’s waterways continue to be polluted.

There is no doubt that industrial sites have cleaned up their act. They would no longer be in business today if they had not. So, why is our nation’s water still so dirty? The answer is very simple. Water follows a natural cycle. It moves from the rain to the mountaintops, through streams and rivers to the sea, and then to the clouds once more.

In the United States, the natural water cycle has been changed in a number of ways. Through dredging, damming, and tampering with or eliminating the ecological niches where water is able to clean itself, we have changed the pathways that water takes through the American landscape, greatly benefiting agriculture and the American economy. In the long run, we have ended up with dirty, impure water. Water treatment remains as the best available technology we have to rectify this problem.

20. Render the following text into Russian and think of a suitable title for it:

The Clean Water Act operates from a baseline prohibition: all discharges of any pollutant by any person into the waters of the United States is illegal. Therefore, all point sources must obtain a permit through the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) before discharging pollutants into water bodies. A point source is considered «any discernible, confined, or discrete conveyance». While a typical example of a point source is a discharge pipe, the definition of point source has been interpreted broadly to cover ditches, erosion channels, gullies or even humans. A pollutant is defined as «dredged spoil, solid waste, incinerator residue, sewage, garbage, sewage sludge, munitions, chemical wastes, biological materials, radioactive materials, heat, wrecked or discarded equipment, rock, sand, cellar dirt and industrial, municipal, and agricultural waste discharged into water». All unpermitted discharges constitute a violation of the Act and are subject to civil and criminal penalties.

Consult the TEXTS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING and learn about water treatment in the middle ages (Text 45) and about a great discovery in water filtration history (Text 46). Be ready to discuss the information you have read.