Text 1 What is Economics?

What do you think of when you hear the word economics?

Money, certainly, and perhaps more complicated things like business, inflation and unemployment. The science of economics studies all these along with others.

Every society has a limited amount of resources and most societies have people with unlimited wants for items, such as cars, money, and services.

Economics is the study of how people and a society choose to use scarce resources to satisfy people’s unlimited wants. In economics, the factors of production are the basic inputs of any productive system. These factors are:

1. Land including all natural resources such as mineral deposits, water, crude oil, etc.

2. Labor is the mental and physical effort of human resources available in the work force of a given country or society. Unskilled, semiskilled workers are terms that describe different types of labor. Management skill is also a type of labor.

3. Capital is the funds provided by investors, lenders, and the profits retained by the firm to finance the firm’s activities. Capital goods are equipment, factories, or anything made by humans that help to produce and distribute products.

4. Entrepreneurship is the process of bringing land, labor, and capital together and taking the risk involved in producing a good or service in hope of making profit.

Very simply, economics studies the way people deal with a fact of life: resources are limited, but our demand for them is not. Resources may be material things, such as food, housing and heating. But time space and convenience, for example, are also resources. Think of a day. There are only 24 hours in one, and we have to choose the best way to spend them. Our everyday life is full of decisions like this. Every decision we make is a trade-off. If you spend more time working, you make more money. However, you will have less time to relax.

Economists study the trade-offs people make. They study the reasons for their decisions. They look at the effects those decisions have on our life and society.

Economists talk about microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Macroeconomics is the study of the overall operations of an economic system. It looks at the economy of a country and of the whole world.

Microeconomics deals with people and private businesses. It looks at the economic decisions people make every day. Microeconomics also deals with companies – small or large – and how they run their business. Any economist will tell you, though, that microeconomics and macroeconomics are closely related. All of our daily microeconomic decisions have an effect on the wider world around us.

Assignments to text 2:

1. Read the text and formulate its theme.

2. Give the headline which would reveal the theme.

3. Write down the key-words and word-combinations which help to define the topic.

4. Translate the text and formulate the main idea.

Text 2

The basic unit of planning and control over production is the enterprise. All modern economic societies have such control units but there are wide differences in the ways they are organized.Indeed, the organisation of enterprise is one of the characteristics distinguishing different types of economic systems.

An economic system is a framework of arrangements for carrying out the specialization and exchange process. Specialization (or division of labor) is the division of work into component tasks, so that each worker can concentrate on perfoming the particular task instead of many tasks. Exchange is trade, or giving up one thing to get another.

It’s common nowadays to distinguish socialist, capitalist and mixed economic systems.

In a socialist economy like the former USSR, most production was centrally planned, controlled and financed. Thus the Soviet economic system was characterized by centralized enterprise and actually functioned much like a single giant consolidated firm. Although socialist production was subdivided into managerial units that were frequently referred to as "enterprises", these smaller units had minimum responsibility for planning and control, and they functioned more like branches or divisions of an enterprise than like individual business firms.

In contrast, an economic system like that of the United States is characterised by private enterprise, that is control and financing of most production are vested in independent, privately organised enterprises.

Capitalists believe that firms that compete with one another to serve customers best serve society. They argue that capitalism offers people the most rights and economic freedom. It also offers freedom to compete private ownership of property, choice of occupation, profit incentives, consumer power. The role of government is limited.

Since no real world economic system is purely capitalistic, communistic or socialistic, we say that economic systems today are mixed. A mixed economy is a blend of private enterprise, government ownership, and government planning.

This textbook is devoted mainly to the institutional organisation of the private enterprises as business firms. You'll come to know different types of firms, and you’ll see how the modern corporation has emerged to meet the needs of mass-production techniques for which huge amounts of capital must be privately assembled under central control, and how the increasing complexity of corporate organisation has required government regulation.

Without going deeply into the problems of accounting, we will examine the statements that summarize the financial position and operations of a business firm, and we will conclude the review of the businesses with an examination of the giant corporation and discussion on how to start your own business.

Assignments to text 3:

1. Read the text and indicate whether you find the headline informative enough.

2. Find the definition of an entrepreneur.

3. Find the sentences which describe personal qualities of an entrepreneur.

4. Specify what kind of a risk the author writes about.

5. Look through the text and headline every paragraph.

5. Translate the text and write down the words to characterise entrepreneurs.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16