The economic infrastructure
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 563.
Part 1 Economies
We generally describe the economy as consisting of three sectors:
• the primary sector: agriculture, and the extraction of raw materials from the earth;
• the secondary sector: manufacturing industry, in which raw materials are turned into finished products (although of course many of the people working for manufacturing companies do not actually make anything, but provide a service - administration, law, finance, marketing, selling, computing, personnel, and so on);
• the tertiary sector: the commercial services that help industry produce and distribute goods to the final consumers, as well as activities such as education, health care, leisure, tourism, and so on.
1.2 a.There is a large number of operations belonging to the different sectors of the economy. Classify the following 18 activities according to which sector they belong to:
advertising products; calculating prices; distributing added value; marketing products; packaging products; smelting iron; assembling; cutting metal; laying cables; milling metal; pressing metal; transportation; building; digging iron ore; maintenance; mining coal; pumping oil; welding metal.
b.Canyou think of three important activities to add to each list?
1.3 Match the following questions and answers:
| 1. What do we mean by the primary sector of the economy? 2. What happens to the food extracted in the primary sector? 3. So what's the secondary sector? 4. So people in the secondary sector make things? 5. And the tertiary sector? 6. Why is the number of people working in the primary sector regularly declining? 7. And why is the secondary sector getting smaller in many of these countries? 8. But not tertiary services? | a. Because agricultural methods are always becoming more efficient. Western Europe and the USA already produce too much food with only 3% of the population working on the land. b. Because much manufacturing can be carried out more cheaply in low-wage economies, for example in East and South-East Asian countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaya and Vietnam. c. Agriculture and the extraction of raw materials from the earth (coal-mining, drilling for oil) or the sea (fishing). d. It includes the commercial services that enable industry to produce and distribute goods to their final consumers (trade, banking, insurance, warehousing, transport, communications, advertising, and so on), as well as activities like education, health care and tourism. e. It involves the transformation of raw materials into finished products. f. Not if the activities require a lot of training, education, know-how and technology. g. Only some of them. Manufacturing companies also employ finance and marketing managers, administrative staff, maintenance staff, and so on. h. Some of it, such as fresh fruit or fish, is consumed almost immediately after extraction; the rest serves as raw material for the secondary sector. |
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| Analog and Digital Circuits | | | Work in pairs Now read through this extract from a business textbook, which deals with a related topic. Fill each gap with one of these words. |