Федеральное агентство по образованию

Государственное образовательное учреждение высшего профессионального образования

МОСКОВСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

Морохова Т.С., Балакина М.В., Макарова О.О.

Учебное пособие

Модуль

ПРАКТИЧЕСКИЙ КУРС АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА ДЛЯ БИЗНЕСМЕНОВ: ОСНОВЫ СОВРЕМЕННОГО БИЗНЕСА (АНГЛИЙСКИЙ ЯЗЫК)

(для студентов II курса)

Москва 2007

CONTENTS

Предисловие ……………………………………………………………….3

Unit 1 Business and Ecology: Causes of Environmental Problems………..5

Unit 2 Business and Ecology: Consequences of Polluting………………..22

Unit 3 Business and Ecology: Ways out…………………………………..42

Unit 4 Business Ethics…………………………………………………….58

Unit 5 Corporate crime……………………………………………………77

Unit 6 Internet……………………………………………………………..96

Glossary…………………………………………………………………...115

Список используемой литературы……………………………………...118

Ответственный редактор: Фокина М.М.

Предисловие

Данное учебное пособие предназначено для студентов второго курса языкового вуза, обучающихся по следующим специальностям: «Мировая экономика», «Маркетинг», «Менеджмент», «Бухгалтерский учет, анализ и аудит» и «Туристический бизнес», и разработано в соответствии с программой учебной дисциплины «Практический курс первого иностранного языка. Английский язык » для студентов – экономистов¹.

Пособие имеет целью формирование лексической базы студентов-экономистов и развитие лингвистической компетенции в области профессионального общения.

Пособие рассчитано на 40 часов аудиторной работы и на такое же количество часов самостоятельной работы.

Учебное пособие состоит из 6 уроков и охватывает такие темы, как бизнес и экология, корпоративная этика, компьютерные технологии и т.д. Каждый урок включает в себя четыре раздела:

1. «Focus on Text Comprehension». В данном разделе даются основной текст урока и упражнения, способствующие глубокому проникновению в содержание текста, а также способствующие формированию навыков обращенной речи на базе прочитанного.

2. «Focus on Vocabulary». Упражнения данного раздела предназначены для усвоения лексического материала урока, его семантизации и активизации в устной речи. Некоторые упражнения представлены связанными текстами и являются дополнительными источниками информации по теме урока.

1. «Language Focus». В данном разделе рассматривается и отрабатывается некоторый лексический и грамматический материал, который представляет определенную трудность для студентов второго курса.

2. «Focus on Speaking». Задания данного раздела направлены на развитие аналитического мышления и активизацию профессионально релевантной лексики.

Достоинством данного пособия является его глубокая профессиональная ориентированность. Авторами проведен тщательный отбор языкового материала и разработана система упражнений, способствующих формированию у студентов интегрированного лексико-грамматического оформления высказывания.

Учебный материал и задания представляют профессиональный интерес для студентов-экономистов, что создает мотивацию для успешного развития их коммуникативных компетенций.

Учебное пособие составлено с учетом требований, которые предъявляются студентам-экономистам второго курса языкового вуза.

Unit 1 Business and Ecology: Causes of Environmental Problems

Pre-text exercises

1. a) Make sure that you know how to pronounce the following words, consult the dictionary if necessary:

enterprise, to process – processing – procession, mining, commerce – commercial, elite, abundance, to echo, theologian, revolutionized, millennium, ranchers, ancient, gallons, fertile – fertilizer - fertility, equivalent, ozone, biotic, to disintegrate, repository, environment, primarily, intimately, excessive, toxin, pollutant, species, unabated, intrusive, paramount, mechanical engineering, fuel, metallurgy, alloys, lumber, vehicle, petroleum, crude, gasoline, component, petrochemicals, fission, uranium, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fibers, analyst, turbine, uranium, corrosion, timber, manual, phenomenon, residual

b) Translate these words into Russian.

Now read the following text and do the exercises after it.

Text

The past one hundred years have seen waves of enterprise sweep across the world, discovering, mining, extracting, and processing tons worth of resources. This flood of commerce has enriched capital cities, ruling families, powerful governments, and corporate elite. It has, therefore, quite naturally produced a dominant commercial culture that believes all resource and social inequality can be resolved through development, invention, high finance, and always growth. This institutional concentration of human energy and creativity is unparalleled in history. Democratic capitalism has delivered goods in quantities that couldn’t have been imagined just two generations ago. Providing that abundance is one of the central goals of doing business and those who believe in capitalism.

The conservative view of free-market capitalism asserts that nothing should be allowed to hinder commerce. In the new world order of the post-communism age, free-market capitalism promises to be the secular savior, echoing theologian Michael Novak’s homage: ”No system has so revolutionized ordinary expectations of human life – lengthened the life span, made the elimination of poverty and famine, enlarged the range of human choice – as democratic capitalism”.

A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, it did not seem urgent to understand the relationship between business and a healthy environment, because natural resources seemed unlimited. But at the beginning of a new millennium we know that we have decimated 97% of the ancient forests in North America; every day farmers and ranchers draw out 20 billion more gallons of water from an underwater river beneath the Great Plains that is larger than any body of fresh water on earth and that will dry up within 30 to 40 years; globally we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil every year, the equivalent of all the wheat fields in Australia. We’ve got greenhouse effect from fuels that warm and transport us, the hole in the ozone layer from chemicals that cool our refrigerators and make worries about safe and convenient home food supply. These critical losses are occurring while the world population is increasing at the rate of 90 million people per year. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping the earth of its biotic capacity to produce life.

Quite simply our business practices are destroying life on the earth. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

Constructive changes in our relationship to the environment have been thwarted primarily because business is not properly designed to adapt to the situation we face. Business has three basic issues to face: what it takes, what it makes and what it wastes, and the three are intimately connected. First, business takes too much from the environment and does so in a harmful way. Second, the products it makes require excessive amounts of energy, toxins, and pollutants. And finally, the method of industrial manufacture and the very products themselves produce extraordinary waste and cause harm to present and future generations of all species including humans. Business economics essentially lacks any guiding principles to relate it to such fundamental and critical concepts as evolution, biological diversity, carrying capacity and the health of the commons.

Furthermore, businesses are defended because most of us are dependent upon them for our livelihood. Ecologists believe that if business continues its unabated expansion it will destroy the world around it. Business believes that if it does not continue to grow and instead cuts back and retreats, it will destroy itself. When environmental issues are presented to businesspeople as one more cost and one more regulation, “doing the right thing” becomes burdensome and intrusive. And the way our economy is organized today, businesspeople are right because doing the right thing might indeed put them out of business.

Industrial manufacturing. In the XX century technological development has given the most powerful upsurge to industry that dominates the business world now. The role of industry is paramount in the world economics. And in the starting century industry is contributing to the civilization’s development, because science and technology never cease searching for the new ways to add to the wellbeing of the world’s society. Among the most developed are the following industrial branches: mechanical engineering (transportation industry), fuel and energy complex (fossil fuels), metallurgy (alloys), and lumber industry.

The transportation industry is vital to a nation’s economy. Reducing the costs of transporting natural resources to production sites and moving finished goods to markets is one of the key factors in economic competition. Transportation is the largest industry in the world. It includes the manufacturing and distribution of vehicles, the production and distribution of fuel, and the provision of transportation services. It provides jobs for millions of people, generates billions of dollars in worldwide revenues and provides the basis for a multitude of related service and support industries.

Energy has always been a clue branch of industry in the world economy. It integrates all life and supports all economies. Some 99% of the energy used to heat Earth, and all our buildings, come directly from the sun. Without this direct input of renewable solar energy, Earth’s average temperature would be –240 C, and life as we know it would not have arisen. The remaining 1% of the energy we use is the portion we generate to supplement the solar energy. Most commercial energy comes from extracting and burning mineral resources, primarily fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).

Petroleum, or crude oil, is pumped out of the well and travels by pipeline to a refinery. There it is heated and distilled to separate it into gasoline, heating oil, diesel oil, asphalt, and other components. Some of the resulting products, called petrochemicals, are used as raw materials for industrial chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fibers, paints, medicines, and many other products. Oil is lifeblood of the global business and economy. It is still cheap, easily transported within and between countries, and has a high net useful energy yield. Oil’s fatal flaw is that affordable supplies may be depleted within 35-80 years.

Natural gas has been less expensive than oil. Besides, gas burns hotter and produces less air pollution than any other fossil fuel. Because of these advantages, some analysts see natural gas as the best fuel to help us make the transition to improved energy efficiency.

Nowadays especially high importance gains nuclear power as a rather effective and ecologically clean source of energy. It is generated by fission process releasing heat, which is used to produce steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. The production of a reliable supply of electricity from nuclear fission requires mining, milling, and transporting uranium; enriching uranium and packing it in appropriate form; building and maintaining the reactor and associated generating equipment; and treating and disposing of spent fuel. These activities require extremely sophisticated and interactive industrial processes and many specialized skills. But still they are less expensive than those connected with fossil fuels processing.

The development of metallurgy in the modern industry is characterized by working out new alloys, possessing some special properties. Such properties as strength and corrosion resistance may be considerably greater for an alloy than for any of the separate metals. For this reason, alloys are more generally used than pure metals. An alloy can often be made to match a predetermined set of characteristics. An important case in which particular characteristics are necessary is the design of rockets, spacecrafts and supersonic aircrafts. The materials used in these vehicles and their engines must be light in weight, very strong and able to sustain very high temperatures.

Lumber industry is the production and harvesting of trees for varied uses, as in the fabrication of telegraph poles and railroad ties, and in building construction, shipbuilding and furniture manufacture. The lumber industry includes the various businesses that convert trees, or timber, into lumber products. Lumber industry in this or that form is one of the most ancient and the most important. Humans have utilized wood for construction for thousands of years. However, the heaviness of timber and the dependence on manual tools for harvesting and manufacturing prevented large-scale lumbering until the mechanical advances of the Industrial Revolution.

So, one can see that the modern industry is a phenomenon which leads the society to the new millennium of its evolution. New branches, technological innovations, modern equipment – all of them follow the humanity in its development and help to obtain easier, happier way of life.

But every moon has two sides. There is one thing about industry that crosses out all its positive characteristics. Indeed, materials don’t disappear after they are used up in the economic sense. They become waste residuals that can cause harm and must be disposed of. This is the main source of numerous ecological problems, which are being so much talked about. Industrial processes produce a lot of hazardous wastes and by-products (ash, metal wastes, poisonous liquids and gases and so on), but people don’t care about their disposal.