2. Read and translate the following text. What is the Internet?

The best way to think of the Internet, or Net as it is often called, is as a vast global network of networks connecting computers across the world. These networks range from government departments and industrial and educational communication systems down to the personal on-line service providers.

At present, more than 33 million people use the Internet and over three million computers worldwide are linked in. Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50%) are in the USA; while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions and their number is growing. According to some statistics, users on the Net are growing at the rate of one million new users per month! They use the Net for transferring data, playing games, socializing with other computer users, and sending e-mail (electronic mail). The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET News, using the World Wide Web, telnet, etc. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion, for example) information will just route around them.

Cyberspace is the term we give to this entire domain. Whenever you are using one of the on-line services such as e-mail or the World Wide Web, you are in cyberspace.

Despite the confusing techno-jargon that surrounds it, the Internet is simple: computers talk to one another through a network that uses phone lines, cables, and fibre-optic lines.

The Net was dreamt up in the late 1960s by the US Defense Department’s Research Agency which decided that, in the event of a nuclear attack, it needed a means by which messages could be sent and received even if phone lines were inoperative. In 1969, there was a network of just four main frame computers. By 1972, the number of frame computers had risen to 40. About this time the idea of the electronic mailbox was born, as users looked for a way of talking to each other electronically. By 1984 when the resources of the network were made available to scientists, the Internet began to develop into the form we know it today.