- •4.1 Anticipating the Issue
- •4.1 A. The Job that Fits
- •1. You will need the following words to speak about skills and abilities necessary for certain jobs. Think which of them apply to you.
- •3. What would be the ideal job for you, and why?
- •4. Study the following verbs describing very important ways of reacting to other people’s emotions which are essential for working in a team.
- •5. Use the words in the following sentences in the correct form.
- •4.1 B. Seeking Employment
- •1. Explain the meaning of the words in bold which are quite often to be found in job advertisements.
- •3. Don’t forget that you should also actively participate in the interview. You should also ask questions which are interesting to you, such as:
- •4.1 C. Watching and Listening
- •1. Before you listen to the tape, discuss the following:
- •2. Listen to the recording and tick only the advice and information that the speakers actually give.
- •3. Discuss the following questions.
- •4.1 D. Group Discussion. Brainstorm Ideas
- •1. Imagine you are a career adviser. What advice would you give to someone who is
- •2. Chinese astrology organizes years into cycles of twelve with each year named after an animal. The Chinese believe that the year you are born in affects your character.
- •4.1 E. Creative Consolidation
- •4.2 Raise the Issue
- •4.2 A. Words in Context
- •1. Tick the word closest in meaning to that of the each boldfaced word. Use the context of the sentences to help you figure out each word’s meaning.
- •2. Write the word next to its definition. The sentences in the previous exercise will help you decide on the meaning of each word.
- •3. Using the answer line provided, complete each item below with the correct word from the box. Use each word once.
- •4.2 B. Headhunters
- •1. Read the article.
- •2. Match the words with their definitions.
- •3. Find words or phrases in the text which match the definitions below.
- •4. Answer the following questions.
- •5. Choose the best answer a, b, c or d. Only one answer is correct.
- •4.2 C. Group Discussion. Brainstorm Ideas.
- •4.2 D. Watching and Listening
- •2. Sally Muggeridge is Management Development Director at Pearson plc.
- •4.2 E. Vocabulary in Focus
- •1. Use the following idioms in the correct form in these situations.
- •3. Aspects of employment
- •4. Common work-related expressions
- •4.2 F. Creative Consolidation
- •2. Project-Making
- •3. Study different job advertisements.
- •4.3 Raise the Issue
- •1. Fill in the following expressions in the dialogue below. You might need them to speak about your plans.
- •4. 3 A. Words in Context
- •1. Tick the word closest in meaning to that of the each boldfaced word. Use the context of the sentences to help you figure out each word’s meaning.
- •2. Write the word next to its definition. The sentences in the previous exercise will help you decide on the meaning of each word.
- •3. Using the answer line provided, complete each item below with the correct word from the box. Use each word once.
- •4.3 B. Inflated Qualifications
- •1. Read the article.
- •2. Match the following words from the article with their definitions.
- •4.3 D. Vocabulary in Focus
- •1. Complete the expressions below using these verbs:
- •2. Use the expressions in these sentences.
- •3. Use the words from the box to complete each sentence.
- •4.3 E. Creative Consolidation
- •4.4 A. Words in Context
- •1. Tick the word closest in meaning to that of the each boldfaced word. Use the context of the sentences to help you figure out each word’s meaning.
- •2. Write the word next to its definition. The sentences in the previous exercise will help you decide on the meaning of each word.
- •3. Using the answer line provided, complete each item below with the correct word from the box. Use each word once.
- •4.4 B. Working Environment
- •2. Explain the meaning of the following words from the article.
- •3. What is your idea of the best organization of business?
- •4.4 D. Vocabulary in Focus
- •1. Complete the dialogues using the following idiomatic expressions.
- •2. Use the following expressions in the sentences below.
- •3. Use expressions from the box in the correct form in the following situations, connected with climbing the career ladder.
- •5. Over to you.
- •4.4 E. Creative Consolidation
- •4.5 Raise the Issue
- •4.5 A. Words in Context
- •1. Tick the word closest in meaning to that of the each boldfaced word. Use the context of the sentences to help you figure out each word’s meaning.
- •2. Write the word next to its definition. The sentences in the previous exercise will help you decide on the meaning of each word.
- •3. Using the answer line provided, complete each item below with the correct word from the box. Use each word once.
- •4.5. B Global Companies
- •1. Read the article.
- •2.Match the following words with their explanations.
- •3. Explain the meaning of the following words and word combinations from the text.
- •9. Word search.
- •10. For discussion.
- •4.5 C. Group Discussion. Brainstorm Ideas
- •4.5 D. Watching and Listening
- •1. Before you listen, decide which points below you think Miguel will make about Latin America and which ones Tong will make about China. Tick the appropriate column on the right.
- •2. What are the similarities and differences between the two cultures?
- •3. Listen to the rest of the interview. Summarize how business decisions are made in China, according to Tong.
- •4.5 E. Vocabulary in Focus
- •1. Match the words that collocate.
- •2. Choose the adjectives that collocate.
- •4.5 F. Creative Consolidation
- •1. Case Study
- •2. Write an essay on the following topics.
- •4. Project – Making
- •4.6 Raise the Issue
- •1. Change the underlined words, using more formal and more appropriate words from the list given. Make all necessary changes.
- •4.6 A. Words in Context
- •1. Tick the word closest in meaning to that of the each boldfaced word. Use the context of the sentences to help you figure out each word’s meaning.
- •2. Write the word next to its definition. The sentences in the previous exercise will help you decide on the meaning of each word.
- •3. Using the answer line provided, complete each item below with the correct word from the box. Use each word once.
- •4.6 B. A Short Cut to Success
- •1. Read the article.
- •2. Match the words from the article with their equivalents.
- •3. Read the article in detail and decide which paragraph mentions the following.
- •3. Distinguish between true and false statements.
- •4. Over to you.
- •4.6 E. Vocabulary in Focus
- •3. Study the following description of the written work for courses.
- •4. The writing process and evaluation.
- •4.6 F. Creative Consolidation
- •1. Write an article for a magazine about the importance of education in contemporary competitive world, developing one of the following theses.
- •2. Write an essay expressing your own opinions on the following statements.
- •3. Project Making
- •4.7 Reading Selection
- •Vocabulary
- •4. Understanding main points.
- •5. Understanding details.
- •6. How the text is organized.
- •7. Discuss the following questions.
- •Vocabulary
- •1. Match the words from the article with their meaning.
- •2. Explain the meaning of the following phrases.
- •3. Decide whether these statements are true or false.
- •4. Answer the following questions.
- •5. Comment on the title and sum up the information of the article.
- •Vocabulary
- •5. For discussion
- •Vocabulary
- •4. Answer the following questions.
- •5. Sum up the information of the article.
- •6. For discussion
- •Vocabulary
- •3. Decide whether the following statements are true or false.
- •4. Using phrases or sentences, outline the "three distinct stages of development" of the high achiever.
- •5. Comment on the title and summarize the article.
- •6. For discussion
- •Vocabulary
- •1. Find equivalents in the article.
- •2. Match the following words and expressions from the article with their definitions.
- •3. Explain the meaning of each adjective used by the author to characterize the ‘blessed barons’.
- •Vocabulary
- •2. What do the following phrases mean?
- •3. Explain the meaning of the following sentences.
- •4. The author paraphrases the common phrase ‘ vicious circle’ into ‘virtuous circle’. What is the difference between the two?
- •6. For discussion
- •Vocabulary
- •1. Match the phrases below with their meaning in the context.
- •2. Find the following expressions and phrases in the article. What are the meanings out of context (literal meanings)? Now decide what they mean in the context (figurative meanings).
- •3. Answer questions 1-5 by choosing a, b, c or d.
- •4. Does the author approve or disapprove of meetings? What pros and cons does he bring? Sum up his arguments.
- •Culture
- •Vocabulary
- •1. Find ten words and phrases in the text associated with each of the following:
- •2. Read the text again in detail to complete the following statements.
- •3. For discussion
- •4.8 Group Discussion
- •4.9 Panel Discussion
- •4.9 A. Vocabulary in Focus
- •1. Fill in the blanks with the words from the box.
- •4.9 B Watching and Listening
- •1. Listen to the first part of the interview and answer the following questions.
- •2. Listen to the second part of the interview and choose the best answer.
- •3. After you listen to the third part of the interview answer the following questions.
- •4.9. C. Brainstorm Ideas
- •4.10 Creative Consolidation
- •2. Write an article developing one of the following theses.
- •4.11 Group Project-Making
Vocabulary
attain – to succeed in reaching a particular level; attainment (n); attainable (adj)
tinker – (with) make small changes to something in order tom repair it or make it better
retain- to keep sth or continue to have sth; retaining fee – money paid to keep someone working for you
nurture – to help a plan, idea, feeling develop; nurture (n)
Match the following words from the article with their definitions
dedication outstanding
eminent give away without feeling sorry
appreciate value high
have no inkling single-mindedness
sacrifice disappointment
refine attract each other
escalate have no idea
gravitate become worse
letdown purify
2. Explain the meaning of the following phrase.
“My parents didn’t have nickels to rub together”.
3. Decide whether the following statements are true or false.
The study took five years, analyzed 120 people in six fields, and was directed by the University of Chicago.
true b. false
2. The results of the study seem to prove that high achievement in various fields results from
great teachers or coaches at a crucial phase of development
unusual natural talents or gifts present at birth
3. The study also shows that extremely successful people.
shared much the same background and phases of development
cannot be categorized one way or another
4. The article ends with Bloom's conviction that
"genius will win out," regardless of outside forces
the human potential for success is enormous and largely untapped
4. Using phrases or sentences, outline the "three distinct stages of development" of the high achiever.
5. Comment on the title and summarize the article.
6. For discussion
- This study and its published results are several years old. Does this invalidate the findings, in your opinion? Why or why not?
- Assuming that Bloom's conclusions are valid, what meaning does this study have for you? For children growing up in families everywhere?
■ 4.7 F. Blessed Barons
Rapacious? Sure. But 19th century titans Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan set the stage for the empire builders of the 20th
by RON CHERNOW
Staring out from their photographs, they are the archetypal tycoons: one a steely-eyed Scot with a spade-shaped white beard; another a craggy, Ichabod Crane look-alike; the third a fat cat in striped pants with a watch chain strung across an ample paunch.
Today they have the look of fossilized reactionaries, but these turn-of-the-century titans were men who lived in booming, anarchic times and thrived on them. The Gilded Age was a turbulent period of unfettered capitalism and unfathomable wealth for them and their peers—an environment free of income tax, meddling regulators and other curbs on the animal spirits of freewheeling entrepreneurs. Yet these febrile decades, forever decried as the era of the robber barons, forged the tremendous engine of economic growth that propelled the country from rural isolationism in the 19th century to world industrial leadership in the 20th.
Three men—Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan—personified this sweeping turn-of-the-century transformation. Imbued with all the greed, guile and enterprise of the age, they exhibited a bullish faith in America's future despite the depressions, strikes and financial panics that punctuated these tumultuous years. In their different ways, each dealt a mortal blow to the small-scale economy of the early republic, fostering vast industries that forever altered the size and scope of the nation's business.
In crafting the first major multinational corporation, Standard Oil, Rockefeller (1839-1937) provided a sneak preview of the 20th century. At his zenith, he refined, distributed and marketed nearly 90% of America's oil. The unlikely offspring of a raffish snake-oil salesman and a strict Baptist mother, Rockefeller grew up in several rustic hamlets in upstate New York and Ohio. He began his career as an assistant bookkeeper in a Cleveland, Ohio, commodity-brokerage house in 1855 and invested in his first refinery during the Civil War.
When he co-founded Standard in 1870, the oil fields of western Pennsylvania—the heart of the new industry-were in a chaotic state as gluts dragged down prices below production costs. Rockefeller then began to employ the tactics that made him a legend. Imposing his own granite discipline on the industry, he bought up rivals, modernized plants and organized the oil industry on an enduring basis.
Never the curmudgeon of myth, Rockefeller had a droll, genial personality that masked supreme cunning and formidable self-control. It is certainly true that he was not the least bit squeamish about tough tactics. He colluded with railroads to gain preferential freight rates, secretly owned rivals, bribed state legislators and engaged in industrial espionage. From Cleveland, he rolled up one refining center after another until his control was absolute. He was still in his 30s, the boy wonder of American business. At the same time, he was a devout Baptist with a ministerial air, who professed to have no less a business expert than the Lord on his side.
Rockefeller believed in a new economic order that he dubbed "cooperation." President Theodore Roosevelt and his trustbusters had another word for it—monopoly—and the Lord proved no help to Rockefeller against T.R. Rockefeller's tough tactics forced America to define the limits of corporate behavior. Since Rockefeller managed to figure out every conceivable anticompetitive practice, the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 simply had to study his career to draw up a reform agenda.
In the end, Rockefeller amassed a fortune that beggared description. When his net worth peaked at $900 million in 1913, it was equivalent to more than 2% of the gross national product; such a share today would be worth $190 billion, or nearly three times as much as Bill Gates' wealth.
Carnegie (1835-1919), the son of a master weaver in Dunfermline, Scotland, saw his boyhood paradise torn asunder when his father's skills were rendered obsolete by the power loom. The Carnegies had to emigrate to the foul Pittsburgh, Pa., slums when Andrew was 12. Quick-witted, shrewd and resilient, he survived a Dickensian adolescence that included working as a bobbin boy in a textile mill.
His first breakthrough came when he landed a job as secretary and telegrapher to
Tom Scott, a powerful overlord of the Pennsylvania Railroad. At 23 Carnegie headed Pennsy's Pittsburgh division and began to rake in a small fortune from outside investments ranging from oil to iron bridges. When he was 33, the rich young man privately lectured himself that his continued pursuit of wealth "must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery." Yet he couldn't abandon the money chase. "Put all your eggs into one basket," Carnegie once advised, "and then watch that basket." For him that basket brimmed with steel. Fiercely competitive, obsessed with innovation and efficiency - he would unhesitatingly scrap a relatively new plant to erect a more modern one—Carnegie imported the Bessemer forced-air steel process to America. Such innovation permitted him to reduce the price of rails—the product that initially drove the industry—from $160 a ton in 1875 to $17 by 1900. His steel furnished the sinews of America's burgeoning towns and factories.
A prolific writer and autodidact who authored eight books and 70 magazine articles, Carnegie was a voluble, if sometimes naive, adherent of the Victorian faith in mankind's progress. His quixotic ideals often clashed, however, with the brute realities of his steel mills, where men toiled 12-hour days, seven days a week. If Carnegie fancied himself the friend of the workingman, he had to face the ultimate comeuppance in 1892 when his associate Henry Clay Frick brutally suppressed striking workers in Homestead, Pa., in the bloodiest clash in U.S. labor history.
After selling his empire to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form the centerpiece of the new behemoth, U.S. Steel, Carnegie devoted himself to good deeds. A prodigious philanthropist, he created 2,800 free libraries worldwide. "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," he declared bluntly. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie endowed large corporate foundations with elastic charters that took on an autonomous existence. At his death he had disbursed almost his entire $350 million fortune.
If Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913) financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street—his nickname was Jupiter—Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become "part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford, Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary.
After studying in Switzerland and Germany, the cosmopolitan young Morgan arrived on Wall Street in 1857, serving as agent for his father Junius Spencer Morgan, who had taken over a London merchant bank. Though Pierpont participated in refinancing the Civil War debt in the 1870s, he acquired true imperial status in underwriting America's railroads.
Morgan issued stocks and bonds for railroads (think of them as you would software companies today), brokered deals among them and dominated their boards. He recapitalized so many bankrupt railroads—Morganized them, as wits said-that by the 1890s he controlled one-sixth of America's railway system.
Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as wasteful and ran afoul of federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern Securities, in the early 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry.
Between 1836 and 1914, the U.S. lacked a central bank; Morgan stepped boldly, sometimes magnificently, into that breach. When gold reserves backing the country's legal tender dipped perilously low in 1895, he masterminded a bond issue in New York and London that replenished the gold stock—one of many acts he performed that preserved America's credit abroad and evinced a new financial maturity that won the confidence of foreign investors.
During the 1907 Panic on Wall Street, an aging Morgan mobilized the city's bankers in his solemnly ornate library and got them to commit money to a rescue fund that ended the bank runs convulsing the city. It was the last hurrah for a self-regulated financial system: Morgan's dazzling improvisation proved the urgent need for a central bank, setting the stage for the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan were not the only robber barons, of course. Edward H. Harriman fought Morgan for control of the railroads. Andrew and Richard Mellon founded four major companies, including Alcoa. But the scale on which Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan operated was unprecedented, paving the way for a world of global companies and capital flows. And their money built a platform for philanthropy that has grown every bit as much as their corporations.
Ron Chernow is the author of Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. He has also written a biography of J.P. Morgan
Culture
T.R. – President Theodore Roosevelt