单选题 This practice book is intended for foreign engineers or students of engineering who have already mastered the elements of English, and who now want to use their knowledge of the language to read books on their own subjects. Readers should understand, however, that the purpose of the book is to teach language, not to teach engineering.
The language in which scientific and technical facts are expressed is certainly not a different language from that of everyday life, but all the same it presents the foreign students with a number of special problems. The most obvious and the most widely recognized of these problems is the vocabulary. Much more difficult are the semi-scientific or semi-technical words, which have a whole range of meanings and are frequently used idiomatically. One of the aims of this practice book is to present as many of these words as possible, and as often as possible, words such as work and paint and load and feed and force. Words like these look harmless, but they can cause a lot of trouble to the students.
But more than anything else, I have tried to describe the technical statement, that is, the completed sentence rather than the individual word. Many of the structures illustrated in the book are found also in ordinary language though not so commonly. But they are essential to the expression of technical facts and ideas — at least for the present.