1. Vocabulary notes:

condo – кондоминиум, дом-совладение; жилой дом, квартиры в котором находятся в собственности жильцов; приватизированная квартира

to repackage – изменять (условия договора)

subprime – субстандартный (о кредите; для заёмщиков с небезупречной кредитной историей; по ставке, на несколько пунктов превышающей основную)

to dry up - истощиться, иссякнуть

fickle borrowing markets – неустойчивый кредитный рынок

merit - достоинство

to stigmatize – клеймить, позорить

flaw – упущение, ошибка

to wean off – отнимать, лишать

murky – темный, мрачный

unlisted bank – незарегистрированный банк

to fib – выдумывать, привирать, придумывать

to envision – предвидеть, прогнозировать

capital ratio – капиталовооруженность

net losses - чистый убыток, чистые потери (сумма, на которую общая сумма расходов превышает общую сумму доходов за данный отчетный период)

disclosure – открытие, разоблачение

to balk at – отказываться от чего-либо

to tap – открывать

securitization – секьюритизация (выпуск ценных бумаг государством под обеспечение будущими налоговыми поступлениями; как правило имеются в виду налоговые поступления конкретного вида)

funding crunch – финансовый кризис

draft – проект

public finances – государственные финансы

to roll over their debts – выплатить долги

puny – слабый

solvency ratio – коэффициент платежеспособности (любой из показателей, характеризующих способность компании погашать долгосрочные обязательства (напр., отношение чистого собственного капитала к суммарным активам))

buffer – амортизатор

unviable – нежизнеспособный

2. Answer the following questions.

1) Comment on the headline of the article. What does it mean?

2) What results of stress tests does ECB is eager to get?

3) Enumerate advantages and disadvantages of stress tests in Europe.

4) What are the possibilities for European firms to overcome economic crisis?

3. Make the summary of the article.

4. Render the article.

Text 6

Wealth, poverty and compassion

The rich are different from you and me

They are more selfish

Jul 29th 2010

LIFE at the bottom is nasty, brutish and short. For this reason, heartless folk might assume that people in the lower social classes will be more self-interested and less inclined to consider the welfare of others than upper-class individuals, who can afford a certain noblesse oblige. A recent study, however, challenges this idea. Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, reported this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest precisely the opposite. It is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity.

In their first experiment, Dr Piff and his team recruited 115 people. To start with, these volunteers were asked to engage in a series of bogus activities, in order to create a misleading impression of the purpose of the research. Eventually, each was told he had been paired with an anonymous partner seated in a different room. Participants were given ten credits and advised that their task was to decide how many of these credits they wanted to keep for themselves and how many (if any) they wished to transfer to their partner. They were also told that the credits they had at the end of the game would be worth real money and that their partners would have no ability to interfere with the outcome.

A week before the game was run, participants were asked their ethnic backgrounds, sex, age, frequency of attendance at religious services and socioeconomic status. During this part of the study, they were presented with a drawing of a ladder with ten rungs on it. Each rung represented people of different levels of education, income and occupational status. They were asked to place an “X” on the rung they felt corresponded to where they stood relative to others in their own community.

The average number of credits people gave away was 4.1. However, an analysis of the results showed that generosity increased as participants’ assessment of their own social status fell. Those who rated themselves at the bottom of the ladder gave away 44% more of their credits than those who put their crosses at the top, even when the effects of age, sex, ethnicity and religiousness had been accounted for.

The prince and the pauper

In follow-up experiments, the researchers asked participants to imagine and write about a hypothetical interaction with someone who was extremely wealthy or extremely poor. This sort of storytelling is used routinely by psychologists when they wish to induce a temporary change in someone’s point of view.

In this case the change intended was to that of a higher or lower social class than the individual perceived he normally belonged to. The researchers then asked participants to indicate what percentage of a person’s income should be spent on charitable donations. They found that both real lower-class participants and those temporarily induced to rank themselves as lower class felt that a greater share of a person’s salary should be used to support charity.

Upper-class participants said 2.1% of incomes should be donated. Lower-class individuals felt that 5.6% was the appropriate slice. Upper-class participants who were induced to believe they were lower class suggested 3.1%. And lower-class individuals who had been “psychologically promoted” thought 3.3% was about right.

A final experiment attempted to test how helpful people of different classes are when actually exposed to a person in need. This time participants were “primed” with video clips, rather than by storytelling, into more or less compassionate states. The researchers then measured their reaction to another participant (actually a research associate) who turned up late and thus needed help with the experimental procedure.

In this case priming made no difference to the lower classes. They always showed compassion to the latecomer. The upper classes, though, could be influenced. Those shown a compassion-inducing video behaved in a more sympathetic way than those shown emotionally neutral footage. That suggests the rich are capable of compassion, if somebody reminds them, but do not show it spontaneously.

One interpretation of all this might be that selfish people find it easier to become rich. Some of the experiments Dr Piff conducted, however, sorted people by the income of the family in which the participant grew up. This revealed that whether high status was inherited or earned made no difference—so the idea that it is the self-made who are especially selfish does not work. Dr Piff himself suggests that the increased compassion which seems to exist among the poor increases generosity and helpfulness, and promotes a level of trust and co-operation that can prove essential for survival during hard times.

1. Vocabulary notes:

noblesse oblige – положение обязывает

to challenge some idea – оспаривать мысль, идею

precisely the opposite – совершенно противоположное

bogus – придуманный, вымышленный

socioeconomic status – социальный статус

occupational status - профессия

rung – ступенька (лестницы)

pauper - нищий

to induce – побуждать, склонять

2. Answer the following questions.

1. Describe the experiment carried out by the researchers of University of California.

2. Is the desire to share one’s wealth dependent on socioeconomic status? In what way?

3. Describe the experiment with storytelling and showing some video clips.

3. Make a summary of the article.

4. Render the article.

Text 7

Greenview: The unsolid Earth

Aug 5th 2010, 16:19 by The Economist online | O.M.

THE Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As it does so it washes away whole mountain ranges—which then rise again from sea-floor sediments when oceans squeeze themselves shut. As oceans reopen new crust is pulled forth from volcanoes; old crust is destroyed as tectonic plates return to the depths from which those volcanoes ultimately draw their fire.

The Earth has finite resources of matter. But thanks to its own internal heat and the light of the sun it has almost unlimited supplies of energy with which to remake itself over a vast range of timescales. Water lasts in the atmosphere for a fortnight or so; carbon dioxide stays in the oceans for thousands of years. Mountains rise and fall over tens of millions of years; oceans open and close at rates even slower than that.

And for some things, in some places, there is a sort of stillness. The argon in the atmosphere just sits there, inert. The crystalline cratons at the centres of continents get neither buried nor torn apart by plate tectonics, though they may sometimes be submerged in shallow seas and sediments as they drift from place to place. Not everything, everywhere is in flux. But it feels as though the harder scientists look at the world, the fewer islands of stability they find.

A study published this week in Nature bears out that trend in a spectacular way. At the centre of the Earth, below the mountains and the oceans and the thin, brittle crust, below the stony, slow-flowing mantle and the roiling outer core of liquid iron, is a solid inner core. If anything about the planet looked unlikely to partake in a process of endless recycling, you might think this ball of metal, 1,200 kilometres across, squeezed from every direction by a planet’s worth of weight, would be it—a dense static hub about which all else turns.

Scientists have known for some time that this inner core is not unchanging. But they had thought that it changed in only one direction—that it simply grew bigger. The Earth is growing cooler as it loses the heat trapped in its creation and generated by radioactive elements within it. It is in fact this cooling which powers the slow circulation of the mantle, and through that the endless remaking of the surface through plate tectonics. As things cool down, the liquid outer core freezes into the solid inner core. It is thought that this process leads the inner core to grow larger at a rate of roughly 30 centimetres a century.

The remarkable new idea floated by Thierry Alboussière, Renaud Deguen and Mickaël Melzani of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble is that this slow growth is a net effect, the residual left over when a greater rate of freezing is offset by a rate of melting almost as large. This notion follows from the hitherto unexplored idea that the spherical inner core is very slightly offset from the planet’s centre of mass, so that one side—the western side, as it happens—is slightly lower than the other. On the lower side the pressure is greater, and liquid iron freezes solid. On the higher side the pressure is less, and solid iron melts.

The net effect of this asymmetry, should it persist, would be what the authors call a “convective translation”: iron that joins the core in the west will slowly move through it until it melts off in the east. At the rate the authors suggest for this process, it would take about 80 million years for iron to pass all the way through and back into the outer core, though the deformation that this flow would impose on the solid core would undoubtedly complicate matters in ways that have yet to be addressed.

This model may be able to explain various oddities about the inner core—such as the fact that seismic waves pass through it differently when headed north-south than when going east-west—and its surroundings, including the existence of a peculiarly dense fluid layer just above it. It is possible that this new behaviour may have implications beyond the core; that it might explain details of the way that the outer core circulates, and thus the ways in which the Earth’s magnetic field changes over time. Once the world is seen as a set of cycles rather than of things it is easier to imagine interesting ways for them to mesh like cogs. The carbon cycle influences the rate at which mountains weather down into seas, the deep circulation of ocean waters helps govern the ebb and flow of ice sheets, and so on.

That said, even if further evidence backs it up, the idea that the inner core is in a continuous cycle of self recreation probably won’t matter that much to the landscapes and ecosystems doing similar things 5,000 kilometres further out. The effect is more one of underlining an aesthetic, or even an ideology, of the planet as an engine of ceaseless self-stabilising change. Such an ideology may serve as a useful guide to dealing with the unavoidable impacts that a large technological civilisation must have on the planet it inhabits: while caution counsels minimising such impacts, a sense of how the planet works suggests that making sure its natural systems can deal with them, that they can become part of the flow, could matter just as much.

That may seem too farfetched. Sufficient, perhaps, just to stop and think how strange it is that the inner core, imperviously locked away since the creation of the world, may yet be added to the long list of other solid-looking things, such as the Himalayas and the Atlantic Ocean and the planet itself, that are in some ways better understood not as places, but as processes.