Intelligent Business Elementary Unit 5.2.

Bice Via Borgospesso 12 Milan, Italy

Bice is a popular restaurant for business lunches. The business lunch menu has four choices, including vegetarian dishes for customers who don't eat meat. The vegetable soup is good and so are the desserts. The restaurant is busy with a lot of tourists. Most people book a table before they arrive.

Cantaloup Rua Manuel Guedes, 474 Sao Paulo, Brazil

This is a favourite place for local people in Sao Paulo. The restaurant has some Brazilian specialities. It is a big restaurant with lots of plants. It is a good place for a special dinner – the food is good, but expensive. There is also a piano bar that has jazz music on Thursday nights.

Intelligent Business Elementary Unit 6.1.

The business of giving

Charity from the rich

Today, many rich and famous people give money to charity. Technology billionaire Bill Gates recently gave $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Other technology leaders also give away money. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first CEO, want to use their billions to help 'make the world a better place'.

Why do charities receive so much money? One reason is that there are more rich people than in the past. The world now has 691 billionaires, compared with 423 in 1996. Rich people in many different countries give millions of euros, riyals, yen and other currencies to charity.

What can the world of charity learn from the world of business? Michael Porter, a management guru at the Harvard Business School, believes that the rich need to think about how their charitable foundations spend money. In the USA, it is traditional for the rich to give money to hospitals, libraries and universities. These are very important, but some people think that this does not always help the very poor.

People with a lot of money often have useful social connections. They usually know how to market ideas and how to interest the media in a subject. So, some people think that the rich can give more than money. They can also use their time, social connections and skills to help find solutions to some of the world's problems, such as poverty and the environment.

Intelligent Business Elementary Unit 6.2.

Where money seems to talk

Is it possible to be rich and happy? Some people say that money can't buy happiness. Experts usually say that millionaires are as happy or unhappy as ordinary people. They agree that family, employment and health are as important as a big salary.

But new research says that cash can make people happy. One survey asked people to say how happy they are by giving points between zero and ten: zero is unhappy and ten is very happy. The results show a connection between money and happiness. In all the rich places (America, Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia), most people say they are happy. In all the poor ones (mainly in Africa), people say they are not. Some countries have different ideas. In Georgia and Armenia, people say they are unhappy but they are not on the list of very poor countries. In South America, many people say that they are happy but they are not on the list of rich countries.

Another survey asks questions about people’s confidence in the future. People in some countries, such as India and Russia, are confident about the future. But in some rich countries, such as France, Germany and Italy, people are not confident. In some countries, for example China, people say that they are not happy at the moment, but they expect good things in the future.