Приложение к контрольной работе № 3 Направление «Прикладная информатика»

ALL THE NEWS THAT FIT TO CLICK

You can't carry a computer as easily as you can a newspaper, but you'll find a lot of other things to like about online newspapers.

More than 100 daily papers in the United States and Canada publish electronic editions. You can connect with them using your computer, a modem and an Internet browser.

Online newspapers have the most up-to-date news. Both USA Today and The San Jose (California) Mercury News add stories to their electronic editions throughout the day.

“To reach” A good example was the Oklahoma City bombing (in April 1995)," said Steve Anderson of USA Today. "We had a photo and a story online within minutes of it happening." Most newspaper readers had to wait until the next morning for their news.

Electronic newspapers also allow you to instantly learn more about a news story through hypertext links. For example, at the end of an online article about the New York Knicks might be headlines of other online articles on the basketball team. Just click on what you want to see next.

Ever wish you had saved a newspaper article, after you threw it away? With electronic newspapers, you can go online and find old articles you need for class discussions, reports or your own personal use.

"Everything that's appeared in The Mercury News for the last 10 years is available on our Web site or America Online," said Barry Parr of The San Jose Mercury News. "There are more than a million news stories in our database."

And you can search papers from all over the United States for the information you need — The Mercury News has links to 16 other papers. In the future, electronic newspapers may add all kinds of new features, like audio and video clips of news you can see and hear on your computer.

Will traditional newspapers ever disappear? Not likely — electronic newspapers are just one more way to reach more people.

Answer the following questions.

1. You can’t carry a computer as easily as you can a newspaper, can you?

2. How do you usually connect with daily papers?

3. What do electronic newspapers allow to learn?

4. Is it possible to search paper from all over USA?

5. Will traditional newspapers ever disappear?

Приложение к контрольной работе № 3 Направление «Торговое дело»

COMMODITY

In economics, a commodity is the term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services.

The word commodity came into use in English in the 15^th century, from the French commodity, to a benefit or profit. The French word derived from Latin and means “fitness, adaptation”. The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there demand is, but which is supplied without qualified differentiation across a market. A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats its instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. “From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist”. Petroleum and copper are other examples of such commodities, their supply and demand being a part of one universal market. Items such as stereo systems, on the other hand, have many aspects of product differentiations, such as the brand, the user interface, the perceived quality, etc. And, the demand for one type of stereo may be much larger than demand on the other.

In contrast, one the characteristics of a commodity good are that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, there are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminum, copper, rice, wheat, gold, silver, palladium, and platinum. Soft commodities are goods that are grown, while hard commodities are the ones that are extracted through mining.

There is another important class of energy commodities which includes electricity, gas, coal and oil. Electricity has the particular characteristic that it is usually uneconomical to store; hence, electricity must be consumed as soon as it is produced. Commoditization (also called commoditization) occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants save become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and DRAM chips. Another example is the credit card product, where all suppliers offer almost identical interest rates, fees, rewards programs, and bait & hook incentive models for new customers. Since the core credit card product is essentially identical, the only remaining market differentiators are branding & customer service.

Answer the following questions.

1. What is commodity?

2. What is the origin of the word “commodity”?

3. Is price determined as a function of the market?

4. What are soft commodities?

5. What are hard commodities?

4. Read and translate the following dialogue.