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using relative dating techniques. The Precambrian accounts for more than 88
percent of geologic time.

Task 9. Put 5 different questions (general, special, alternative, disjunctive
and to the subject of the sentence) to the following sentences:

1. Physical geology examines the materials composing Earth and seeks to understand
the many processes that operate beneath and upon its surface.
2. Geology is perceived as a science that is done in the out of doors.
3. Geology is a science that seeks to expand our knowledge of the natural world and
our place in it.

Task 10. Read the following text, translate it into Ukrainian. Render its
main ideas according to the following plan:
1. Historical notes about geology.
2. Catastrophism.
3. The birth of modern geology.
4. Geology today.
The nature of our Earth—its materials and its processes—has been a focus of
study for centuries. Writings about fossils, gems, earthquakes, and volcanoes date back
to the Greeks, more than 2300 years ago. Certainly, the most influential Greek
philosopher was Aristotle. Unfortunately,
Aristotle’s explanations about the natural world were not derived from keen
observations and experiments, as is modern science. Instead, they were arbitrary
pronouncements based on the limited knowledge of his day. He believed that rocks
were created under the “influence” of the stars and that earthquakes occurred when air
in the ground was heated by central fires and escaped explosively! When confronted
with a fossil fish, he explained that “a great many fishes live in the earth motionless and
are found when excavations are made.” Although Aristotle’s explanations may have
been adequate for his day, they unfortunately continued to be expounded for many
centuries, thus thwarting the acceptance of more up-to-date ideas.
In the mid-1600s James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all
Ireland, published a major work that had immediate and profound influences. A
respected scholar of the Bible, Ussher constructed a chronology of human and Earth
history in which he determined that Earth was only a few thousand years old, having
been created in 4004 BC. Ussher’s treatise earned widespread acceptance among
Europe’s scientific and religious leaders, and his chronology was soon printed in the
margins of the Bible itself. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the doctrine
of catastrophism strongly influenced people’s thinking about Earth. Briefly stated,
catastrophists believed that Earth’s landscapes had been shaped primarily by great
catastrophes. Features such as mountains and canyons, which today we know take great
periods of time to form, were explained as having been produced by sudden and often
worldwide
disasters produced by unknown causes that no longer operate. This philosophy was an
attempt to fit the rates of Earth processes to the then current ideas on the age of Earth.
Against this backdrop of Aristotle’s views and an Earth created in 4004BC, a
Scottish physician and gentleman farmer named James Hutton published Theory of the
Earth in 1795. In this work Hutton put forth a fundamental principle that is a pillar of
geology today: uniformitarianism. It states that the physical, chemical, and biological
laws that operate today also operated in the geologic past. In other words, the forces and
processes that we observe shaping our planet today have been at work for a very long

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