Text 3. Pay Before You Talk

By the 1990s many people were using mobile phones for both business and pleasure. They had a contract and received a bill for calls they had made in the previous month. Vodafone, a successful UK mobile phone company, was already making good profits when it introduced its new Pay As You Talk service in 1997. This allowed customers to have a phone without a contract and monthly 10 bills. Instead, they have a 'top up' card to extend calling and service credit. The advantage for customers was that they could carefully budget the amount of money spent — very useful for parents who gave phones to 15 their children. Vodafone's great idea was to get people to pay in advance for their calls. Thanks to this, sales increased.

11. Complete the parts of the chart which relate to your text.

	Herta Herzog	Richard Sears	Vodafone
Job/Industry	Advertising
Where idea was created		the US
Date of idea			1997
Great idea(s)
Result of idea

12. Exchange information and complete all the sections of the chart.

13. Say what were these people doing when they had their great ideas?

• Herta Herzog

• Richard Sears

• Vodafone

14. Complete the story below with the past simple or past continuous forms of the verbs in brackets.

Mr Fry - Keep me posted

In the early 1970s, Art Fry, a research scientist, had the idea for Post it Notes while he was singing in his local church choir. At that time he...................¹ (mark) the correct pages in his hymn book with small pieces of paper. The problem was they often....................² (fall) out and he..................................³ (lose) his place.

At the same time, Dr Spencer Silver, a colleague of Mr Fry's at the American company 3M,..............................⁴ (do) research into adhesives in the Central Research Department. One day when Fry.......................⁵ (use) some of a new adhesive on the edge of a piece of paper, he found that it.............................⁶ (stay) where he put it. He also found he could move it to another position without damaging his book - a perfect bookmark. A little later he ........................⁷ (write) a note on a 'bookmark' and put it on a report he ........................⁸ (send) to a colleague. A new way of communicating and organising information began. Post-its have now become an essential part of office life.

15. Read the text and think of its heading.

Money is not a means of exchange but is also a means of measuring the value of men's labour. In economic theory, "labour" is any work undertaken in return for a fixed payment. The work undertaken by a mother in caring for her children may be hard work, but it receives no fixed payment. It is not therefore labour in strict economic sense.

As a scientist, the economist is interested in measuring the services which people render to each other. Although he is aware of the services which people provide for no financial reward, he is not concerned with these services. He is interested essentially in services which are measurable in terms of money payments of a fixed and/or regular nature. In economics, money is the standard by which the value of things is judged. This standard is not a religious or subjective standard, but an objective and scientific one.

Human labour produces both goods and services. The activities of a farmworker and a nurse are very different, but both are measurable in terms of payment received. Labour in this sense is not concerned with distinctions of social class, but simply with the payment of wages in return for work. When we talk about "the national labour force", however, we are thinking of all those people who are available for work within the nation, i.e. the working population

It should be noted that any person engaged in private business is not paid a fixed sum for his activities. He is self-employed and his activities are partly those of an employer and partly those of an employee. If however he employs an assistant, to whom he pays a fixed wage, his new employee provides labour in return for payment. He receives his wages, while his employer receives the surplus (large or small) from the whole business. This surplus is the reward of private enterprise and is known as "profil".