Английский разговорный язык. Практическое пособие по развитию устной речи

The number one country in the world at any given time has always been the productivity leader. It was northern Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the Dutch republic in the seventeenth and early eighteenth, Britain in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth, and the United States for the entire twentieth century.

Слова и выражения:

aggregate – совокупность; совокупный

boundless – безграничный

criterion – критерий

define – определять

definition – определение

entire – полный, целый

familiar – известный, знакомый

portion – часть

postwar – послевоенный

productivity – производительность (труда)

whereas – в то время как

well-being – благосостояние

divided by – разделенный (на)

managerial skill

– мастерство управления

due to – благодаря ( чему-либо ), из-за ( чего-либо )

added capital – добавленный капитал

the Dutch republic – Голландская республика

Exercise 10

Answer the questions:

1. Why is the rate of productivity growth considered the most important thing for the economic well-being of a country?

2. What is the most familiar definition of labour productivity?

3. In what terms can output be expressed?

4. What other inputs apart from hours worked, can be taken into consideration in talking about productivity?

5. How much of the growth in labour productivity in the postwar years in the USA could be accounted for by the added capital.

6. By what means can a country raise its level of consumption?

7. Which is preferable in the long run?

8. What makes a country the number one country in the world?

9. What countries were the leaders in the world in the past, and when?

Natural Resources

The natural resources are limited. If we use them continuously, we will eventually exhaust them. But there is another approach to the problem. According to it the earth\'s exhaustible natural resources can actually increase year after year, perhaps never coming to an end. How can this fact be accounted for? The answer is that the effective stocks of natural resources are continually growing due to the technological developments that have enhanced the growth in living standards since XIXth century.

First, innovation has boosted up the productivity of natural resources. Second, innovation makes it possible to recycle resources, thus reducing waste. Third, innovation affects the prospective output contribution of natural resources (for example, the coal still underneath the ground). If the discovery of new sources or technological innovation in a given year raises the prospective output by an amount greater than the reduction in that year, then the stock of that resource will be larger at the end of the year than at the beginning. The exhaustion of a particular resource, though not impossible, is also not inevitable.

Since the times of the industrial revolution, consumption of power and raw materials has grown rapidly. We used more energy between 1900 and 1920 than in all previous time, and each twenty year period since has experienced a similar rate of increase in power demands. Still, new sources of power have made it possible to make up for the used resourses of energy.

Experts assert that the effective stocks of a natural resource can be increased in at least three ways:

1. New technologies are able to reduce the amount of a metal lost during mining or smelting, which increases the effective stock of this metal. In the similar way, innovations allow for extracting more resources out of previously abandoned sources. The less we waste, the more of effective resource is available.

2. The effective stocks of natural resources within the economy may be increased by substituting one resource for another. The illustration of this was the energy crises of the seventies, when people used insulation extensively to save fuel (fiberglass substituted oil and coal).

3. The third method to boost up our effective stocks natural resources is recycling.

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