《材料科学与工程专业英语》Unit1 Materials Science and Metallurgical Engineering Materials are properly more deep-seated in our culture than most of us realize. Trans -portation, housing, clothing, communication, recreation and food production--virtually every segment of our everyday lives is influenced to one degree or another by materials. Historically, the development and advancement of societies have been intimately tied to the members' abilities to produce and manipulate materials to fill their needs. In fact, early civilizations have been designated by the level of their materials development(i.e.Stone Age, Bronze Age). The earliest humans has access to only a very limited number of materials, those that occur naturally stone, wood, clay, skins, and so on. With time they discovered techniques for producing materials that had properties superior to those of the natural ones: these new materials included pottery and various metals. Furthermore, it was discovered that the properties of a material could be altered by heat treatments and by the addition of other substances. At this point, materials utilization was totally a selection process, that is, deciding from a given, rather limited set of materials the one that was best suited for an application by virtue of its characteristic. It was not until relatively recent times that scientists came to understand the relationships between the structural elements of materials and their properties. This knowledge, acquired in the past 60 years or so, has empowered them to fashion, to a large degree, the characteristics of materials. Thus, tens of thousands of different materials have evolved with rather specialized characteristics that meet the needs of our modern a...
