| | | Words
in the News |
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INTRO | |
BBC
Central European Analyst Jan Repa reported on how, at a ceremony in
Warsaw, Britain gave Poland one of the Second World War German Enigma
encoding machines. |
| IN
FULL | |
 | Listen
to the report in full |
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21st September 2000 UK
gives Enigma machine to Poland |
|
| NEWS
1 | | | Listen
to the first part of the report |
| | | According
to British accounts, Germany’s vital ‘Enigma’ code was cracked
a year before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 by British cryptographers
who went on to break successively more sophisticated German codes throughout the
war. The information is said to have contributed to defeating Germany’s attempt
to bomb Britain into submission in 1940; the destruction of a large part
of the German army in Normandy in 1944; and, thanks to an Allied tip-off,
to Soviet victory in the war’s greatest tank battle at Kursk in 1943. The Poles
say the ‘Enigma’ code was first broken in 1933, six years before the outbreak
of war, by a team of Polish mathematicians, who went on to work at the secret
British wartime decoding centre at Bletchley Park. |
| | | | Listen
to the words |
|
WORDS | |
vital
- if something
is very important, it is
vital Enigma
- name for the German
machine which turned normal text into secret code cracked
- if a secret code
is broken, it is cracked the
outbreak of hostilities - when a war starts it is described as being the the
outbreak of hostilities
cryptographers - people
whose job is to break secret codes to
bomb .... into submission - to make a country surrender by bombing a lot tip-off
- a useful piece of information about something that is going to happen is a tip-off |
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| NEWS
2 | | | Listen
to the second part of the report |
| | | The
Poles say they managed to construct copies of successive versions of the
‘Enigma’ , two of which they passed on to Britain and France in 1939. At the Warsaw
ceremony, the Duke of York acknowledged the contribution made by Polish
code-breakers, after which the Polish Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek, declared the
Polish side’s "great satisfaction". But the Polish government is also pressing
for information on the fate of the wartime archives of the Polish
intelligence service, which were taken over by Britain. The British side says
the archives were destroyed because they contained no important information, but
the Poles remain unconvinced. |
| | | | Listen
to the words |
| WORDS | |
to construct
- to build acknowledged
the contribution made by - officially
said how important what they did was pressing
- if you
are asking strongly for something, you are pressing for it the
fate of - what
happened to archives
- historical documents
and records are archives remain
unconvinced - if you remain unconvinced of something then you still
do not believe it is true |
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