Business and the Economy

Everybody's task (E.T.): read to be prepared to answer the questions and do the tasks given below:

Pre-reading task: have a look at the following words and if you don't know them look them up in your dictionary it will help a lot while you are reading the article:

cereals processing manufacturing fuel

mining output catering concerned with

1 Patterns of change. On Industries and History

А nation's industries can be divided into three sectors of activity. The primary sector is concerned with raw materials such as cereals and minerals. Processing these materials is the field of the manufacturing sector. The service sector provides services of various kinds such as transport or distribution, but does not manufacture goods. The construction industry can be thought of either as part of the manufacturing sector, or as a separate fourth sector.

Earlier in its history, Britain had a very large manufacturing sector. Food, fuel and raw materials such as cotton were imported in large quantities and paid for with finished goods manufactured in Britain: it was known as 'the workshop of the world'. Today, the manufacturing sector and the small primary sector are employing even fewer people. For example, during the first half of the 1980s the mining and energy industries lost 20 per cent of their jobs. This was mainly through increases in productivity, so that fewer workers were producing the same output more efficiently. Productivity rose by 14 per cent in the same period in British industry as a whole, although it had previously been low by comparison with other advanced industrial nations. Meanwhile service industries like banking and catering were expanding their workforce.

Britain has a mixed economy, based partly on state ownership but mainly on private enterprise. In the mid-eighties the private sector accounted for 72 per cent of total employment and 74 per cent of the goods and services produced in Britain. Government policy throughout the 1980s was to sell state-owned industries such as British Telecom and British Airways to private investors, thereby further increasing the size of the private sector.

E.T.: The following list contains a confusion of various industries. Put them in order by writing the name of each industry under the corresponding title:

repairs, agriculture, finance and insurance, engineering (including vehicles), banking, construction, forestry and fishing, distribution, other services, manufacturing, hotels and catering, metals and chemicals, transport and communications, water and energy (including coal), mining,

Primary sector Manufacturing sector Service sector

E.T.: Vocabulary

In the article find synonyms of the words and phrases given below

production hire employees involved in

production rate building processing

E.T.: Collect the types of sentences that serve to display changes of quantitative values and translate them into Russian.

E.T.: Match the following words and their definitions.

privatize treatment or preparation by a special method, e.g. treatment of food in

order to preserve it

state-owned industry that provides ready-made food for the customers

distribution transferring of the production of goods and services from the public sector of

an economy into private ownership and operation

catering part of the public sector of an economy

processing process of physically satisfying the demands for goods and services

E.T.: Answer the questions.

1 What raw material is used to cook the traditional English dish for breakfast?

2 Which sectors of British industry are increasing in size, and which are decreasing?

3 What proportion of the British workforce are involved in manufacturing?

4 What made it possible to reduce the number of people employed in mining, agriculture and manufacturing industries?