Living in the Moon's Shadow - Test 2

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Cambridge English Proficiency 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about the present-day importance of the moon landings. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A–E). The sections may be chosen more than once.

On December 19, 1972, a sonic boom above the South Pacific signaled the completion of the Apollo program, as a tiny space capsule burst back through the blue sky. On board were the last three astronauts to visit the moon. The space race has changed the course of human history far more profoundly than anyone could have predicted in 1961, when a new president challenged America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. No one present knew how to make it happen. But that wasn't going to stop them rising to President Kennedy's dare.

As progress in human space flight sped up through the 1960s, Ph.D. intake at American universities, particularly in the field of physics, increased almost threefold. Apollo was making America cleverer. Within weeks of Kennedy's speech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was asked to work out the small matter of helping astronauts make a soft landing on a moving target hurtling through space 250,000 miles from Earth. To assist them in this, a small, lightweight computer was proposed by MIT. In the early '60s, computers often took up entire rooms. To miniaturize one enough to pack it into a modestly-sized craft they'd need new technology, so they turned to a brand new arrival on the technology scene: the integrated circuit.

Only a few companies were experimenting with these new micro-electronic components at the time; keen to help them perfect the performance of these novel miniature circuits, NASA ordered one million of them. The agency really only needed a few hundred, but, aware that they would be betting the lives of their astronauts on them, they were keen to make sure the manufacturers could make them as reliable as possible. Such a financial kickstart to a fledgling industry, coupled with another gift of Apollo — inspiration — would prove to be powerful drivers for technological change in the decades that followed. Those graduating across the world in the '70s and '80s had watched Apollo's engineers dream the impossible and then build it. As an act of human ingenuity, Apollo made them giddy, intoxicated on admiration and inspiration. As William Bainbridge put it in his book 'The Spaceflight Revolution', Apollo was 'a grand attempt to reach beyond the world of mundane life and transcend the ordinary limits of human existence through accomplishment of the miraculous – a story of engineers who tried to reach the heavens.'

Many of the people who have built the new tools of the Internet and the technological infrastructure that underpins it cite Apollo as their motivator. Professor Sir Martin Sweeting founded the world-renowned small satellite company SSTL, which revolutionized the industry. 'Apollo started me on this whole pathway of getting involved in space,' says Sweeting. 'The idea of being able to participate in something as exciting as a lunar landing, it stimulated an ambition, the dream of building my own satellite with my friends.' The idea of a small private enterprise launching a satellite was considered pretty crazy at the time, he points out. 'After building the first one, I had a lot of advice to go out and get a proper job. I'm sure that without Apollo I would have followed a more conventional career.'

Former NASA flight director Glynn Lunney witnessed the trickle-down straight from Apollo to the rest of us. 'We were asking people to do things 10 or 20 years ahead of when they would otherwise have done them. And they knew it. They stepped up to it and succeeded. Today's cell phones, wireless equipment, tablet computers and so on are a result of the fact that the country did this high-tech thing and made this large portfolio of technologies available.' Today's population, over half of whom weren't born when those last astronauts returned from the moon, use these inventions to communicate with each other freely and without a thought for geographical and cultural differences. The gifts of Apollo continue to ripple down the decades, and still have the power to unite and inspire us.

Living in the Moon's Shadow

More than forty years on, why the moon landings are still having an impact today

a tribute to the ambitions of the space programme

the accelerated development of technology

a lack of encouragement to continue with a project

various factors which made a task particularly challenging

an individual example of the inspiring effects of Apollo

an event marking the end of an era

a spirited response to a seemingly impossible provocation

the effects of the space programme on attitudes to sharing information

a radical alteration of existing technology

an influential combination of factors affecting the space programme

In which section are the following mentioned?

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