Task 1. Work with a partner. Fill the gaps in the text with words from the box in their correct form. alloy; characteristic; communication; clay; crystal; heat; housing; manipulate; metal; pot- tery: property (2); skin; specimen; substance; structure; technological; wood Materials used in food, clothing, transportation, recreation and influence virtually every segment of our everyday lives. Historically, materials have played a major role in the development of societies, whose advancement depended on their access to materials and on their ability to produce and them. In fact, historians named civilizations by the level of their materials development, e.g. the Stone Age (beginning around 2.5 million BC), the Bronze Age (3500 BC), and the Iron Age (1000 BC). The earliest humans had access to only a very limited number of materials, those that occur naturally, e.g. and With time they discovered tech- niques for producing materials that had properties superior to those of the natural ones; these new materials included and various Furthermore, early humans discovered that the properties of a material could be altered I. Eisenbach, English for Materials Science and Engineering. DOI 10.1007/978-3-8348-9955-2_1. Vieweg-Teubner Verlag | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2011 2 Chapter 1 Introduction by treatments, e.g. to soften metals, and by adding other to produce a new material, e.g. by melting copper, then mixing it with tin to form bronze which could be regarded as the first Until recently, selecting a material involved choosing from a number of familiar materials the one most appropriate for the intended application by virtue of its characteristics but without knowing much about its structure. Only in the 19th century did scientists begin to understand the relationships between the structural elements of materials and their In 1864 the Englishman Henry Sorby first showed the microstruc- ture of a metal when he developed a technique for etching the surface layer of a polished metal by a chemical reaction. He used a light reflecting microscope to