Required Courses Year 1

Microeconomics	Financial Accounting
Macroeconomics	Business Statistics
Marketing	Business Law
Business Finance	Managerial Accounting
English

Year 2

Strategic Management	Consumer Behavior
Managerial Information Systems	Human Resource Management
Personal Development	Business Planning
Operational Management	Negotiations and Conflict Management
Financial Markets, Investments, and Banking	Marketing Communications
International Management	English
New Product management

The faculty uses various delivery systems in the classroom: the traditional lecture/discussion, case method, simulation, model building, and laboratory techniques. These methods emphasize an analytical, conceptual, and theoretical balance throughout the program, which helps sharpen students’ resourcefulness in solving complex problems and selecting optimal courses of action. Students are given many opportunities to demonstrate their writing and verbal competency and to improve interpersonal communication. At the end of the second year students defend Master’s Theses.

Questions

1. What degree do undergraduate students study for?

2. What a second, more specialized degree do students study for?

3. What are similarities and differences of an economic course curriculum in American universities and the BSU? Write a list of courses you are taking in the first year. Consult a dictionary if it is necessary.

4. What kind of degree is MBA? What is the aim of this program? What courses does the program of International Graduate School of Business and Management of Technology (BSU) offer?

5. What field of activity would you choose:economics or business administration? Give your arguments¹.

Note:

1. One of the techniques to create an argument is as follows:

1. state the claim;

2. explain the claim;

3. prove the claim. Provide evidence and reasoning;

4. make a conclusion.

Example of an argument:

1. Good manager plays an important role in the company.

2. He fullfills the vital functions: planning, organizung, forecasting.

3. By applying his managerial skills the manager can bring profit to the company.

4. That is why the manager’s role in the company can not be overestimated.

Text 3

Outstanding Economists

Work in groups of three. Look at the outline on the next page. Each person should scan one of the articles and take notes in the appropriate section of the outline. Then share information so that you and your partner have the same data and can fill in the outline completely.

A.

The Founder of Economics

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy located to the north of Edinburgh in the year 1723. Adam Smith was to become the first political economist the world had ever known. He was to take his place at the head of the first school of economics, one that continues and is known as the "classical school." In 1740, at the age of seventeen, Smith was sent off to Oxford on scholarship.

In 1751, at age twenty-eight, Adam Smith became a professor of Logic at Glasgow. It was his first academic appointment. Smith was a curious human being. He treasured his library, and was continually absorbed in abstractions; he was notoriously absent-minded. Smith led a quiet and sheltered life; he lived with his mother (she lived to be ninety) and remained a bachelor all his life. Though silent and awkward in social situations, Adam Smith possessed, in considerable perfection, the peculiarly Scotch gift of abstract oratory. Even in common conversation, when once moved, he expounded his favourite ideas very admirably. As a teacher in public he did even better; he wrote almost nothing, and though at the beginning of a lecture he often hesitated, we are told, and seemed 'not to be sufficiently possessed of the subject,' yet in a minute or two he became fluent, and poured out an interesting series of animated arguments. Adam Smith acquired a great reputation as a lecturer.

Some time later he became a tutor to a wealthy Scottish duke. Then he received a grant of 300 pounds a year. It was a very big sum, 10 times the average income at that time. With the financial security of his grant, Smith devoted 10 years to writing his work which founded economic science. Its full name was ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ It was published with great success in 1776.

The Wealth of Nations opens with a description of the specialization of labour in the manufacture of pins; the book covers a variety of subjects: from the professorships at Oxford to the statistics on the herring catch since 1771; from stamp duties to the coined money used by the Romans. The book is full of detail. What Adam Smith did in his book was to explain how self-interest was the engine of the economy and competition its governor. He set forth the great lesson that all economists come to sooner or later. Robert Heilbroner wrote: “First, he [Adam Smith] has explained how prices are kept from ranging arbitrarily away from the actual cost of producing a good. Second, he has explained how society can induce its producers of commodities to provide it with what it wants. Third, he has pointed out why high prices are a self-curing disease, for they cause production in those lines to increase. And finally, he has accounted for a basic similarity of incomes at each level of the great producing strata of the nation. In a word, he has found in the mechanism of the market a self-regulating system which provides for society's orderly provision.”

On July 17th, 1790, Adam Smith died at Edinburgh; he was buried in the Canongate churchyard.

B.