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English for Computer Science

Lecture 4

Reading in General (3)

Importance of Paragraphs in Reading

Understanding Paragraph Structure

Reading within and between Paragraphs

Reading Practice

Importance of Paragraphs in Reading

Paragraphs make the skeleton of a passage.

A paragraph conveys a complete train of thought.

Understanding the logic between paragraphs is key to reading CS papers in English.

Understanding Paragraph Structure

Topic sentence

Supporting details

Concluding sentence (optional)

Computer organization helps optimize performance-based products. For example, software engineers need to know the processing ability of processors. They may need to optimize software in order to gain the most performance at the least expense. This can require quite detailed analysis of the computer organization.

Reading within and between Paragraphs Exemplification

Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but are also dynamically reallocated per demand. This can work for allocating resources to users.

For example, a cloud computer facility that serves European users during European business hours with a specific application (e.g., email) may reallocate the same resources to serve North American users during North America's business hours with a different application (e.g., a web server).

Reading within and between Paragraphs Elaboration

The actual data mining task often deals with cluster analysis, anomaly detection, association rule mining.

In other words, data mining is the automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large quantities of data to extract previously unknown interesting patterns such as groups of data records, unusual records and dependencies.

Reading within and between Paragraphs Comparison

With internal storage, the contents of the smaller object are stored inside the larger object. By contrast, with external storage, the smaller objects are allocated in their own location, and the larger object only stores references to them.

Reading within and between Paragraphs Causality

CPUs with larger word sizes require more circuitry and consequently are physically larger, cost more, and consume more power (and therefore generate more heat). As a result, smaller 4- or 8-bit microcontrollers are commonly used in modern applications even though CPUs with much larger word sizes (such as 16, 32, 64, even 128-bit) are available.

Reading within and between Paragraphs Conclusion

TinyOS is perhaps the first operating system specifically designed for wireless sensor networks …

LiteOS is a newly developed OS for wireless sensor networks ...

Contiki is an OS which uses a simpler programming style in C while providing advances such as 6LoWPAN and Protothreads.

RIOT implements a microkernel architecture ...

To conclude, operating systems for wireless sensor network nodes are typically less complex than general-purpose operating systems.

Reading within and between Paragraphs Sequence

The history of Windows dates back to September 1981, when Chase Bishop, a computer scientist, designed the first model of an electronic device and project "Interface Manager" was started. But Windows 1.0 was not released until November 1985.

Windows 2.0 was released in December 1987 and was more popular than its predecessor …

Windows 3.0, released in 1990, improved the design …

The next major consumer-oriented release of Windows, Windows 95, was released on August 24, 1995 …

In-Class Exercise

Read the following paragraph and choose its logic from the list of {elaboration, exemplification, comparison}.

PowerShell allows multiple named stacks to be used. Locations can be pushed onto/popped from the current stack or a named stack. Any stack can become the current stack. Unlike most other shells, PowerShell's location concept allow location stacks to hold file system locations as well as other location types like e.g. Active Directory organizational units/groups, SQL Server databases/tables/objects, Internet Information Server applications/sites/virtual directories.

Reading Practice

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How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.

See you next time.

Aristotle