I1. According to the text, are the following statements true or false?

1. The "burn rate" number signals how much of the company is being transferred from investors to employers each year.

2. Now a commodity, options have long since become diverted from their original purpose of rewarding a cadre of managers for a job well done.

3. Companies granting large numbers of options thus show a fatter bottom line than they would if those options hadn’t been listed as an expense.

4. It is now quite common, should a stock collapse, for companies to lower the purchase price on options already granted to employees, in order to stem a mass exodus of talent.

5. Pat McGurn, a vice-president at Institutional Shareholder Services, which reviews proxy questions for institutional clients, cautions that the issue couldn’t trigger "the battle of battles" between shareholders and management.

6. Dilution becomes a threat when a company's stock rises and employees begin cashing in their profitable options.

7. What happens if a company's earnings slow down and the stock price remains high? One likely scenario: to forestall dilution, the company would have to venture into the market and sell out large blocks of stock as wave after wave of options granted in earlier, more profitable times get exercised.

8. Another curiosity of the accounting system: when companies issue shares to employees exercising their options, the company can take a tax deduction as compensation expense.

III. Match the words from the text with their definitions.

1) sentiment	a) loyal in supporting
2) staunch	b) thought, opinion or idea
3) concede	c) causing or likely to cause disagreement
4) gibberish	d) the movement of a lot of people from the place
5) quandary	e) words which are nonsense and have no meaning
6) exodus	f) to admit that smth is true/to allow
7) contentious	g) strong and healthy
8) forestall	h) a state of not being able to decide what to do about the situation in which you are involved
9) robust	i) to prevent from happening by acting first
10) intolerable	j ) extremely irritating or annoying

IV. Find English equivalents in the text to the word-combinations that follow:

1. кадровый состав управленцев

2. правомерные вопросы

3. окончательные сделки/неразрывные контракты

4. доказуемая ценность

5. капитал компании

6. неприемлемый компромисс

7. изменение цен

V. Read the text and point out the main ideas which are discussed in it. Text II. Sound Investing During Market Volatility

Recent increases in the volatility of the financial markets have many investors thinking about their portfolios and wondering if they should make changes.

This is therefore an excellent time to discuss the importance of maintaining a disciplined approach to diversified investing.

Here are four key points to keep in mind about disciplined, diversified investing during periods of market volatility:

1) Diversification is a tool designed to reduce risk. In the financial markets risk and reward go together. Higher reward investments tend to carry greater risk. Although all investors would like nothing better than a high reward investment that carries low risk, it is important to remember how rare that is. When one diversifies one's portfolio, it is to reduce risk. We do not diversify in order to maximize reward, rather we diversify in order to reduce risk and portfolio volatility.

2) If one's portfolio is properly diversified, then one need not carry around a great deal of anxiety about the daily ups and downs of the market. With reduced volatility that proper diversification brings, one need not become either exutant in an up market nor dejected in a down market. Instead one maintains a centered, approach to long term investing - not overreacting to market volatility.

3) Asset allocation and diversification is best done by calendar rather than by reactivity to market conditions. One of the biggest traps for investors is to get excited and buy when markets are rising (thereby buying high) and to get scared and sell when markets are falling (thereby selling low). The best way to avoid this is to review one's asset allocation at a regularly scheduled account review.

4) One of the best ways to build wealth is to take a longer time horizon to your investments. Sound investments, held over a long time horizon is the approach that we find works best. As Warren Buffet has said "in the short term the stock market is a voting machine, in the long term it is a weighing machine." In a short time horizon, emotions and group psychology rule the ups and downs of the markets. In the long term, the fundamental value of sound investments will rule the day.

Investors may well be in a better position to ride out the short term volatility we see in today's markets by maintaining the discipline of diversified asset allocation with a longer time horizon.