Английский. Учебник МЭО 1 курс. Учебное пособие по английскому языку. Мировая экономика. Часть 1 Москва 2012 удк 81(075. 8)111 ббк 81 Англ. 7365. 5
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Part 2 Read the passage below and match each paragraph with the appropriate heading.
Career: Economist 1)____ The field of economics rewards creative and curious thinkers. Economists study data and statistics in order to spot trends in economic activity, economic confidence levels, and consumer attitudes. They assess this information using advanced methods in statistical analysis, mathematics, computer programming; finally they make recommendations about ways to improve the efficiency of a system or take advantage of trends as they begin. 2)_____ While economists were previously relegated to the academic and government communities, they are now finding employment in significant numbers throughout the private sector. The number of privately owned economic consulting firms has grown by about 150 percent over the last six years, to reach about 5,000 as of this writing. These firms offer advice to and predict economic scenarios for individuals and large corporations, and occasionally act as consultants to branches of the government. However, universities and research groups remain the largest employers of economists, followed by the government. “I love being an economist. I get a glimpse of the future, or what we think it’s going to be,” raved one economist we surveyed. High levels of satisfaction are found throughout this field, which encourages discussion, detailed examination, and lively disagreement. 3)_____ Economists work closely with each other and share ideas fairly easily, which leads to a strong sense of community within the profession. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the profession is its highly theoretical nature. One ex-partner of a private advertising and economics firm wrote, “It’s all numbers which assume perfect market behavior. People don’t work that way. The don’t buy according to their optimal strategy; they buy because they feel like it.” 4)_____ The lack of a clear-cut relationship between theoretical modeling and reality eats away at some economists’ belief in what they do. The daily routine of each economist is determined by the specialty chosen. Financial economists meet with members of Wall Street firms and government officials to predict the movement and pace of global financial markets. International economists may spend as much as 30 percent of their time traveling and 40 percent of the time on the phone researching current trends in foreign economic systems (for this subgroup, language skills are important). Other fields include agricultural economics, labor economics, and law and economics. 5)_____ Graduates with bachelor’s degrees in economics find entry-level positions in which their primary responsibilities are the collection, assimilation and preparation of data. For positions with greater responsibility, such as those in teaching or government, a master’s degree or Ph.D. is required. The more quantitative course requirements of the economics major include statistics, regression analysis, and econometrics. These form the core of business life, but at the same time, those who are comfortable with the written or spoken word have a significantly higher rate of advancement and overall job satisfaction than those who are not. 6)_____ Applicants should be comfortable with computers, numbers, and long academic papers. Many women who start in academia find they are more successful in the private sector. The ability to distinguish yourself from other economists is key, but can be difficult, especially within a particular company’s or industry’s accepted economic assumptions. Creative thinkers and those who have taken cross-discipline course loads, such as philosophy or marketing, seem to find it easier to break from the pack and propose new, interesting additions to the economic canon. Technological breakthroughs bring countless new possibilities to economic analysis for economists to explore and present. 7)_____ Economists who leave the profession find a wide range of careers open to them. Their statistical and mathematical skills make them well-suited for careers as statisticians, bankers, stockbrokers, options traders, equity research analysts, and any other profession that requires systems modeling. Their research and writing skills allow them to become financial journalists, research analysts, academics in other fields, and administrative managers. (http://www.princetonreview.com/careers.aspx?cid=56) Ex 1. Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-F from the box below.
Ex 2. Speak about your choice of profession using words and word combinations given below. Why have you decided on Economics as you future job? Do you think you’ll make a good economist? Why?
Ex 3. Work in pairs. Discuss advantages and disadvantages of a certain profession. Make use of the following plan:
Ex 4. Use additional sources and find some more detailed information about the work schedule of a financial economist (an international economist). Be ready to speak on it in class or make up dialogues (in the form on interviews). Unit IX Part 1 Globalization globalization, integration, cross-border trade, driver, pros and cons, dissemination of information, transfer, interdependence Text A Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well-being in societies around the world. Globalization is not new, though. For thousands of years, people—and, later, corporations—have been buying from and selling to each other in lands at great distances, such as through the famed Silk Road across Central Asia that connected China and Europe during the Middle Ages. Likewise, for centuries, people and corporations have invested in enterprises in other countries. In fact, many of the features of the current wave of globalization are similar to those prevailing before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. But policy and technological developments of the past few decades have spurred increases in cross-border trade, investment, and migration so large that many observers believe the world has entered a qualitatively new phase in its economic development. Since 1950, for example, the volume of world trade has increased by 20 times, and from just 1997 to 1999 flows of foreign investment nearly doubled, from $468 billion to $827 billion. Distinguishing this current wave of globalization from earlier ones, author Thomas Friedman has said that today globalization is “farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper.” This current wave of globalization has been driven by policies that have opened economies domestically and internationally. In the years since the Second World War, and especially during the past two decades, many governments have adopted free-market economic systems, vastly increasing their own productive potential and creating myriad new opportunities for international trade and investment. Governments also have negotiated dramatic reductions in barriers to commerce and have established international agreements to promote trade in goods, services, and investment. Taking advantage of new opportunities in foreign markets, corporations have built foreign factories and established production and marketing arrangements with foreign partners. A defining feature of globalization, therefore, is an international industrial and financial business structure. Technology has been the other principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of individual economic actors—consumers, investors, businesses—valuable new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more informed analyses of economic trends around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners. Globalization is deeply controversial, however. Proponents of globalization argue that it allows poor countries and their citizens to develop economically and raise their standards of living, while opponents of globalization claim that the creation of an unfettered international free market has benefited multinational corporations in the Western world at the expense of local enterprises, local cultures, and common people. Resistance to globalization has therefore taken shape both at a popular and at a governmental level as people and governments try to manage the flow of capital, labor, goods, and ideas that constitute the current wave of globalization. The Pros and Cons of Globalization Pluses: • Productivity grows more quickly when countries produce goods and services in which they have a comparative advantage. Living standards can go up faster. • Global competition and cheap imports keep a lid on prices, so inflation is less likely to derail economic growth. • An open economy spurs innovation with fresh ideas from abroad. • Export jobs often pay more than other jobs. • Unfettered capital flows give the U.S. access to foreign investment and keep interest rates low. Minuses: • Millions of Americans have lost jobs due to imports or production shifts abroad. Most find new jobs–that pay less. • Millions of others fear losing their jobs, especially at those companies operating under competitive pressure. • Workers face pay-cut demands from employers, which often threaten to export jobs. • Service and white-collar jobs are increasingly vulnerable to operations moving offshore. • U.S. employees can lose their comparative advantage when companies build advanced factories in low-wage countries, making them as productive as those at home Vocabularylist
Notes
Ex 1. Find the Russian equivalents: a process driven by international trade; human physical well-being; the current wave of globalization; the outbreak of the 1st world war; to adopt a free-market economic system; barriers to commerce; taking advantage of new opportunities; an international industries and financial business structure; the driver of globalization; deeply controversial; to benefit corporations at the expense of local enterprises; to take shape both at a popular and at a government level; interdepence of different countries’ economies; multinational integrated structures; vulnerability to local and regional instability. Ex 2. Fill in the gaps with the words and expressions from the text.
Ex 3. Find in the text the English equivalents for the following: взаимодействие между людьми, компаниями и правительствами; иметь влияние на экономическое развитие и процветание; современный процесс глобализации; вступить в качественно новую фазу экономических отношений; способствовать торговле товарами и услугами; пользуясь новыми возможностями; приносить пользу корпорациям за счет местных мероприятий; взаимозависимость экономик разных стран; препятствовать свободному движению капитала; уязвимость мировой экономики. Ex 4. Match each term with the appropriate explanation. interaction, globalization, cross-border, controversial, vulnerability, interdependence, integration
Ex 5.Answer the questions.
Ex 6. Find in the text the words and expressions that characterize or mean:
Ex 7. Comment on the following:
Ex 8. Increase your vocabulary. A. Study the word combinations with the words “integration” and “interaction”. Use them in the sentences of your own.
B. TranslateintoEnglish.
Text B Russia and Globalization The future of Russia as a modern nation directly depends on its involvement in the globalization process. The greatest difficulty for Russia is in the information and communication aspect of globalization as its large territory makes the process of effective dissemination of information, including official orders from the center to the regions, a serious challenge. Consequently, most information becomes simply outdated by the time it reaches its addressees. Today, a country’s competitiveness depends on its capability to provide its citizens, especially the intellectual and political classes, with comprehensive local and international information. In conditions of complete globalization, no single country can form or create all the external conditions that are favorable for it. On the contrary, it should be able to realistically assess its long-term needs, problems, prospects and search for development opportunities within the existing external circumstances. Russia occupies a very specific place in the global economy, participates along with the most advanced nations in an outer space exploration. Russian culture continues to make a valuable contribution to the development of civilization; the huge potential and capability of its sciences are powerful forces of economic development. But at the same time, Russia is lopsidedly dependent on its natural resources and raw-commodity exports, lacks competitiveness in its domestic production, and has low living standards that exacerbate the country’s already catastrophic demographic trends in general and the quality of such parameter as human capital in particular. Russia faces a series of extremely difficult dilemmas. Russia, by historical traditions and geography, but mainly because of its powerful nuclear potential, belongs to the class of superpower nations. The external attributes of this status is its membership of the UN Security Council, G8, G20, the Russia-EU summits, etc. However, in terms of participation in the information revolution and internalization of production processes and capital, Russia lags far behind the leaders. The pros and cons of globalization for Russia: It is also necessary to adopt more steps at the micro-level as a basis for boosting globalization of processes. This is because globalization of international trade, especially if a country’s goods and services are very competitive, is, certainly, a positive trend. On the contrary, if such country does not produce competitive goods, then globalization of foreign trade activities becomes a threat not only to its economy, but also to its sovereignty as a whole. This problem is a vital one for today's Russia, especially in connection with its possible admission into the WTO. Globalization is connected with transfer of new economic and technological processes across national borders as interdependence of different countries’ economies and expansion of national economies into multinational integrated structures become a daily routine. One of the greatest advantages of globalization is that it eliminates the barriers that hinder the free movement of capital, technologies, information, qualified labor forces and intellectual properties across national borders, while one of its biggest is that the growing interdependence also increases the vulnerability of global economy to local and regional instability. Full integration into the system of global market economy is possible only in the event that a country’s economy satisfies certain conditions. First of all, it should be able to produce an amount of additional products that exceeds a certain minimum level. Globalization was initiated and put into practice by some transnational business circles in Northern America, Europe and Japan and it, first and foremost, specifically meets the economic needs of these countries. The most effective application of globalization is being done by the United States that is actively tapping people, information, capital and other resources from across the globe for its economic prosperity. Russia’s goal is not to oppose the United States and other leading Western countries in their attempts to use globalization to maximally secure their national interests. Quite the contrary, Russia should focus on seeking a niche in the globalization processes that can help foster its long-term, stable development as a nation. Vocabulary list
Notes
Ex 1. Suggest the Russian equivalents: involvement in the globalization process; a serious challenge; to provide citizens with comprehensive local and international information; to assess long-term needs; the huge potential and capability; to be dependent on nature resources; raw-commodity exports; to lack competitiveness in domestic production; to face a series of dilemmas; to faster long-term stable development. Ex 2. Fill in the gaps with the words and expressions from the text.
Ex 3.Find in the text the English equivalents for the following: эффективное распространение информации; трудная задача; исчерпывающая информация; создавать благоприятные внешние условия; возможности развития; наиболее развитые страны; вносить ценный вклад в развитие цивилизации; мощные силы; значительно отставать от лидеров; стать угрозой суверенитету; превысить определенный минимальный уровень; наиболее эффективное использование преимуществ глобализации; защищать национальные интересы; способствовать долгосрочному стабильному развитию. Ex 4. Match each term with the appropriate explanation. dissemination of information, transfer, external, internal
Ex 5. Answer the questions and do the assignments.
Ex 6. Comment on the following:
Ex 7. Increase your vocabulary.
Writing Task I. Write a Summary and a Gist of Texts A and B. Task II. Fill in the table about pros and cons of globalization.
Speaking Task I. Comment on the table from Task II (Writing). Do you think globalization has more positive sides than negative ones? Why? Bear out your statement. Task II. Hold a discussion about globalization as a new phenomenon. What can it give (or has already given) to Russia? To your family?To you personally? Discuss the issue with the group. Task III. Act as interpreter for Parts A and B.
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