1. Ответы на вопросы к тексту по специальности

1. What does economics deal with?

2. What doesn’t economics normally include?

3. Is there a clear division between “economics” and “noneconomics” phenomena?

А market economy

Throughout history, every society has faced the fundamental economic problem of deciding what to produce, and for whom, in a world of limited resources. In the 20th century, two competing economic systems, broadly speaking, have provided very different answers: command economies directed by a centralized government, and market economies based on private enterprise. Today, in the last decade of the 20th century, it is clear that, for people throughout the world, the central, command economy model has failed to sustain economic growth, to achieve a measure of prosperity, or even to provide economic security for its citizens.

Yet for many, the fundamental principles and mechanisms of the alternative, a market economy, remain unfamiliar or misunderstood — despite its demonstrable successes in diverse societies from Western Europe to North America and Asia. In part, this is because the market economy is not an ideology, but a set of time-tested practices and institutions about how individuals and societies can live and prosper economically. Market economies are, by their very nature, decentralized, flexible, practical and changeable. The central fact about market economies is that there is no center. Indeed, one of the founding metaphors for the private marketplace is that of the "invisible hand."

Market economies may be practical, but they also rest upon the fundamental principle of individual freedom: freedom as a consumer to choose among competing products and services; freedom as a producer to start or expand a business and share its risks and rewards; freedom as a worker to choose a job or career, join a labor union or change employers.

1. Ответы на вопросы к тексту по специальности

1. What fundamental economic problem has every society faced?

2. What is a market economy?

3. How can you describe a market economy?

Money

Money is used for buying or selling goods, for measuring value and for storing wealth. Almost every society now has a money economy based on coins and paper notes of one kind or another. However, this has not always been true. In primitive societies a system of barter was used. Barter was a system of direct exchange of goods. Somebody could exchange a sheep, for example, for anything in the market-place that they considered to be of equal value. Barter, however, was a very unsatisfactory system because people’s precise needs seldom coincided. People needed a more practical system of exchange, and various money systems developed based on goods which the members of a society recognized as having value. Cattle, grain, teeth, shells, feathers, skulls, salt, elephant tusks and tobacco have all been used. Precious metals gradually took over because, when made into coins, they were portable, durable, recognizable and divisible into larger and smaller units of value.

A coin is a piece of metal, usually disc-shaped, which bears lettering, designs or numbers showing its value. Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coins were given monetary worth based on the exact amount of metal contained in them, but most modern coins are based on face value, the value that governments choose to give them, irrespective of the actual metal content. Coins have been made of gold, silver, copper, aluminium, nickel, lead, zinc, plastic, and in China even from pressed tea leaves. Most governments now issue paper money in the form of notes. Paper money is obviously easier to handle and much more convenient in the modern world.