Useful terms and expressions

• shale producer – компания, занимающаяся добычей сланцевого газа/нефти

• to ratchet back – сдерживать, притормаживать

• to bend to – смиряться, покоряться, подчиняться

• dismal – удручающий, бедственный, катастрофический

• on par – наравне, на одном уровне, сопоставимо

• to pump – качать, добывать (нефть)

• at full tilt – полным ходом, изо всех сил

• driller – буровая компания

• hurdle – препятствие, проблема, трудность

• to throttle back – уменьшать обороты, сбрасывать газ, притормаживать

• a well – скважина

• to tap – вскрывать (пласт, залежь, месторождение)

• to coax – выкачивать, вытягивать

• interest payment – процентный платеж

• to put a lid on sth – приостановить, положить конец

• to turn on a spigot – открыть кран

TEXT 7

Translate the article into Russian orally.

Is u.S. Manufacturing making a comeback — or is it just hype?

It’s hardly news when a U.S. firm moves its manufacturing operations abroad to China. But what about when a Chinese company sets up a factory in the United States?

That actually happened in January, when Lenovo, a Beijing-based computer maker, opened a new manufacturing line in Whitsett, N.C., to handle assembly of PCs, tablets, workstations and servers.

The rationale? The company is expanding into the U.S. market and needs the flexibility to assemble units for speedy delivery across the country, says Jay Parker, Lenovo’s president for North America.

While it’s still cheaper to build things in China, those famously low Chinese wages have risen in recent years. U.S. firms that have long operated abroad are making similar moves: Caterpillar, GE and Ford are among those that have announced that they’re shifting some manufacturing operations back to the United States. And economists are now debating whether these stories are a blip — or whether they signal the beginning of a major renaissances for American manufacturing.

It’s easy to be skeptical. So far, the effect on jobs has been modest. Since January 2010, the United States has added 520,000 manufacturing jobs — and of those, just 50,000 have come from overseas firms moving here, according to the Reshoring Initiative. That’s a decent number, but it pales beside the 6 million factory jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says vanished between 2000 and 2009.

Yet the optimists counter that the logic of a manufacturing comeback remains compelling. Besides the shrinking wage gap between China and the United States, the productivity of the American worker keeps rising. Shipping costs are rising as well, making outsourcing more costly. And the surge in shale gas drilling gives the United States a wealth of cheap domestic energy to bolster industries such as petrochemicals.

All that could combine to make U.S. factories more competitive in the years ahead, not just with Europe and Japan, but with the manufacturing behemoth in China. This shift won’t mean the United States will have 19 million manufacturing workers again, the way it did in the 1980s. For one thing, automation is still a powerful force. And the types of jobs that come back will be very different from the ones that vanished. Still, any significant uptick in domestic manufacturing after a decades-long decline could bolster the economy and spur innovation.

The Washington Post, May 1^st, 2013