Flights and fares

Ø 1) Study the following words and guess what this text may be about. Read the article.

Aer Lingus. It operates four return flights daily to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris during the week. In total, it runs 26 flights per week, with a total seat capacity of 2, 730. Weekday flights from Dublin leave at 7.55 am, 11.55 am, 4 pm and 6.25 pm. Aer Lingus flights from Paris leave at 8.55 am, 11.15 am, 3.15 pm and 7.25 pm. Aer Lingus has nine fares for tickets that include a Saturday night stay, ranging from £ 99 return to £ 219, depending on the flexibility that the passenger requires.

The lowest fully flexible same-day return available from Aer Lingus is £ 464, while the business class seat costs £ 499.

Public transport, bus and the underground rail are available from Charles de Gaulle Airport, while a taxi to the city centre will cost at least £ 20.

Ryanair. The operator has three return flights to Paris Beauvais every day. Flights leave Dublin at 7.05am, 1.55 pm and 5.40 pm and Paris Beauvais at 9.55 am, 4.45 pm and 8.30 pm. A same day return with Ryanair costs £ 149 but there is no refund if you cancel. For £ 199 you can get a refund if there is a cancellation. Ryanair leisure fares start at £ 50 return. Ryanair has a fixed price deal with the Ser’Cent Foxtrot taxi company of €40 for each additional passenger. If you want a cab back to Beauvais from Paris, you have to ring that particular company rather than simply flagging any taxi on the street.

With a return cab fare of £ 94 it would probably be cheaper to hire a car for the day – so long as you don’t mind braving Parisian traffic, you know where you are going and you don’t need to work on the way. Ryanair also operates a bus service from Beauvais to Paris which costs €40 one way.

City Jet. Leisure fares are priced at £ 99 and £ 318, though a Saturday overnight is mandatory. Its same-day return fares range from £ 324 to £ 499. City Jet’s new service to Paris has come about through a relationship with Air France’s weekend flights to Dublin/Paris.

City Jet flies to Air France’s terminal 2B at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Flights depart from Dublin at 7.30 am and 17.40 pm, arriving in Paris at 9.55 am and 20.05 pm (local time), and depart Paris at 11.10 am and 20.50 pm.

Charles de Gaulle is serviced by bus and the underground train service which can take you to the city centre or other destinations. Alternatively, a taxi service will take you to the city centre in about 20 minutes at a cost of €240.

Ø 2) Imagine you are a participant in the situations given below. Answer the questions in each situation.

a) You are to get from Dublin to Paris to attend a very important conference. You are short of time. It’s 3 pm now and the conference starts at 10am tomorrow. What operator will you turn to? What transport in Paris will you use to get to the place of destination in time?

b) Your family decided to spend a weekend in Paris to visit some museums. What operator will you choose? What will be the times of departure from Dublin and arrival to Paris? What kind of transport will you choose while in Paris? How much will the trip cost?

c) A famous Paris suburb is mentioned in one of the texts. What is it called? If you decide to go there by car, will you stop a taxi in the street or ring a taxi company? What does the author of the article recommend and why?

2.31 Pea-sized universe not so far-fetched

According to the latest theory, the entire universe may once have been the size of a pea before the Big Bang blew it apart. The theorist is Stephen Hawking.

Dick Ahlstromhas been trying to make sense of it.

Ø 1) Have you heard anything of the Big Bang theory (creation of the universe, the Earth or the Solar system)? Who is the author of this theory? Are you interested in such kind of questions as creation of the universe? Why?

Ø 2) Read the text and answer the questions:

a) What are the ancient ideas about the structure and functions of the universe?

b) What are the current theories of the universe?

c) Who put forward the theory of the pea-sized lump of matter which blew up in the Big Bang, thus creating the universe?

d) What is the essence of this theory?

e) What was the universe point of view of Ptolemy?

f) What were the views of Einstein?

g) Can Stephen Hawking and Neil Turok prove their theory on paper?

h) What are the practical steps to prove the theory of the Big Bang?

If you want to get down to real basics can you do any better than cosmology, the study of how the universe came to be? You could fiddle around with test tubes, explore human biochemistry or take a trip to the moon, but real scien­tists don’t fool around with this stuff, they try to solve the ultimate riddle - Why is there something rather than nothing?

For centuries this effort had been left in the hands of philoso­phers who gazed at the stars, and decided the sun revolved around the earth, carried on the back of a giant turtle which bathed itself each evening in the far western ocean where the water ran off the edge of the flat earth.

We are better informed now. Now we know that everything in our solar system, the Milky Way, and all the billions of gal­axies around us used to be con­densed into a pea-sized lump of matter that for no particular reason blew up in the Big Bang, thus creating the universe.

The cosmos as pea isn’t so far­fetched, however, Prof Stephen Hawking - reckoned to be the greatest mind since Albert Ein­stein - can prove mathemati­cally on paper why this could be so. The Cambridge don and author of A Brief History of Time has proposed this latest schema for the creation of the universe - known as Open In­flation - with Prof Neil Turok, who holds the chair of mathe­matical physics at Cambridge.

The theory offers everything from the creation of matter from kinetic energy through the for­mation of planets, stars and gal­axies and on to a universe that will most likely continue expanding forever, like a balloon that doesn’t know when to quit. Cosmologists such as Hawking or Turok can have all sorts of fun producing theories about how the universe came to be and one might sound crazier than the next except for one key point - you have to be able to prove what you say. As was pointed out by Dr William Reville in Monday’s Science Today column, theory after cosmological theory fell by the wayside as new astronomical proofs became available.

The view of Ptolemy, the an­cient Greek geographer, that the other planets, sun and stars revolved around the earth, held sway for 1, 400 years until Co­pernicus and later Kepler, Galileo and Brahe delivered ob­servations and mathematical models that proved the theory wrong. The latest Hawking/Turok attack is a continuation of this ongoing scientific process.

Often the pace of this evolu­tion is quickened by the intro­duction of new technology - the telescope, for example. Other times, it is an intuitive leap for­ward, as in this case, with the two mathematicians attempting to make observations of the uni­verse today gel with some theo­retical suppositions of how things might have been 12 to 15 billion years ago.

Their view is based on what might have happened just before the cataclysm that marked the birth of the cosmos. Current the­ories suggest that space and time began with the Big Bang - a discharge of energy beyond human comprehension. While time has counted out the seconds ever since, space has continued to expand like that balloon.

Einstein taught us matter can­not be created or destroyed, just changed back and forth between matter and energy. The stars, galaxies and all other matter condensed out of the Big Bang energy and began moving away from the starting point, carried forward by expanding space. We can observe this expansion today by looking for the change in wavelengths in infrared radia­tion from distant stars.

Hawking and Turok can show on paper, however, that the whole universe was started off by something that could be as small as a pea, suspended in a timeless void. Prof Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory, lik­ened it to a ball-bearing sitting at the top of a curve. At some stage the bearing began rolling, converting its potential energy into kinetic energy and then, abruptly - the Big Bang.

“Hawking has a solution to a set of equations that starts from a finite amount of matter and creates an infinite universe, ” Prof Bailey explained. The equa­tions are also predicated and made possible on the assumption that gravity will never be enough to pull all of the matter in the universe back into a pre-Big Bang configuration. In other words, the universe will continue expanding forever to infinity.

Experimental realities provide a de­manding clockwork into which the new theory must integrate. The problem, Prof Bailey sug­gests, is that most people simply can’t comprehend the scale of the observable universe and so disregard its reality.

“What we see with our tele­scopes in fact is a real world. It is vast and insofar as we under­stand the laws of physics, all of these things are real and not just high-tech images on a screen.”

The mathematical mod­els told us that we should still be able to detect remnants of the microwave radiation given off by the Big Bang, at the moment the clock hands began their first sweep. This radiation was de­tected first in 1965 and then con­firmed by the СОВЕ satellite this decade.

Now an even more sensitive satellite, Planck, is to be launched in search of this radia­tion and similar satellites are on the way that will be able to scan backwards through time to the birth of the Cosmos. “It is remarkable that we now have at our fingertips the ability to come to conclusions about the creation of the universe, ” Prof Bailey stated.

These satellites will deliver the latest and most comprehen­sive answer yet to the question, “What is the stars? ”, that is, at least until the next theory sends the pea on its way to join the turtle.

Ø 3) Make up an outline of the text in writing.