Unit 1
Warming Up Activity
1. Translate from Russian into English using proper prepositions:
11 ноября 1615 г., 18 марта 1066 г., (назначено) на 9 апреля 1988 г. вечером 11 сентября 2001 г., накануне 31 марта 2003 г., после 18 декабря 2019 г., до 27 октября 1963 г., в 4 утра 22 июня 1941 г., вплоть до 15 мая 1535 г., (датировано) 9 января 1905 г., о 29 февраля 1988 г.
2. Say the time in English:
08.40; 17.35; 18.03; 09.04; 20.15; 19.27; 16.54; 23.30; 0.00; 15.05; 03.55; 09.17; 06.07; 07.06; 13.41; 21.38; 22.39; 12.19; 14.26; 05.48; 04.32; 02.20.
3. Say in words:
1,7 %; 1,000,345; $475; £ 236; 圓 88; ¥ 32; 14,57 %; € 589; Rs 32,000; ₪ 56; 25,750; 45 ha; 50 mph; 20 ml; 10>9 Hz; 230 V.
Reading
4. Read the text.
The word economy comes from the Greek word oikonomos, which means “one who manages a household.” At first, this origin might seem peculiar. But in fact, households and economies have much in common.
A household faces many decisions. It must decide which members of the household do which tasks and what each member gets in return: Who cooks dinner? Who does the laundry? Who gets the extra dessert at dinner? Who gets to choose what TV show to watch? In short, the household must allocate its scarce resources among its various members, taking into account each member’s abilities, efforts, and desires.
Like a household, a society faces many decisions. A society must find some way to decide what jobs will be done and who will do them. It needs some people to grow food, other people to make clothing, and still others to design computer software. Once society has allocated people (as well as land, buildings, and machines) to various jobs, it must also allocate the output of goods and services they produce. It must decide who will eat caviar and who will eat potatoes. It must decide who will drive a Ferrari and who will take the bus. The management of society’s resources is important because resources are scarce.
Scarcity means that society has limited resources and therefore cannot produce all the goods and services people wish to have. Just as each member of a household cannot get everything he or she wants, each individual in a society cannot attain the highest standard of living to which he or she might aspire.
Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. In most societies, resources are allocated not by an all-powerful dictator but through the combined actions of millions of households and firms. Economists therefore study how people make decisions: how much they work, what they buy, how much they save, and how they invest their savings. Economists also study how people interact with one another. For instance, they examine how the multitude of buyers and sellers of a good together determine the price at which the good is sold and the quantity that is sold. Finally, economists analyze forces and trends that affect the economy as a whole, including the growth in average income, the fraction of the population that cannot find work, and the rate at which prices are rising. The study of economics has many facets, but it is unified by several central ideas.
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To understand why people choose to depend on others for goods and services and how this choice improves their lives, let’s look at a simple economy. Imagine that there are two goods in the world: meat and potatoes. And there are two people in the world – a cattle rancher and a potato farmer – each of whom would like to eat both meat and potatoes.
The gains from trade are most obvious if the rancher can produce only meat and the farmer can produce only potatoes. In one scenario, the rancher and the farmer could choose to have nothing to do with each other. But after several months of eating beef roasted, boiled, broiled, and grilled, the rancher might decide that self-sufficiency is not all it’s cracked up to be. The farmer, who has been eating potatoes mashed, fried, baked, and scalloped, would likely agree. It is easy to see that trade would allow them to enjoy greater variety: Each could then have a steak with a baked potato or a burger with fries.
