1. Understanding the main points

Decide whether the following statements are true or false.

True False

1. By 1925, a car was rolling off the assembly line every twenty-five seconds.

2. The eighteenth-century American Navy with its professional officers and craftsmen was the pioneer.

3. There were separate assembly lines for the engines, the magnetos, and the transmissions, all converging into the final assembly shop.

4. In Germany, large electricity companies focused on their big industrial clients.

5. Taylorism also included redesigning the work space, the work flow, and the machines and the lighting, ventilation, and working conditions, including the provision of toilets.

2. Vocabulary focus 1

Complete the gaps. Use each word in the list below once.

assemble deliberate ahead ambition converging shop various upholstery brakes demand snaked raw components door-to-door

1. In the first year of production, it took over twelve hours to ___________ each car from the __________ ____________.

2. There were separate assembly lines for the engines, the magnetos, and transmissions, all ___________ into the final assembly _______.

3. Railway lines _____________ into the plant, bringing coal and _______ materials and the subcontracted items like the tires and ________.

4. There were no ________ on his __________, and River Rouge went __________.

5. The American way required the _____________ expansion of __________, which was accomplished by hiring hordes of __________ salesmen to sell the mushrooming household electrical appliances that required electricity.

3. Vocabulary focus 2

Find words or phrases in the text which mean the same as the following:

1. the arrangement of elements or details in a product or a work of art

2. decisive, also important, significant

3. an arrangement of machines, equipment, and workers in which work passes from operation to operation in a direct line

4. payment for labor or services according to contract

5. one who owns corporate stock

6. adequate to accomplish a purpose or meet a need by itself

7. the quantity of goods wanted at a stated price

8. a sudden failure

9. a period of popularity

10. a person in charge of a group of workers

4. Vocabulary focus 3

Give your explanations of ten different words or phrases from the text for other students of your group to find

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5. Discuss the following questions:

1. How had Ford become a systems engineer?

2. What was the idea of Ford’s explanation: “Save ten steps a day for each of 12,000 employees and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.”?

3. What system did Germany and Soviet Russia come to call “Fordismus”?

4. Who reinforced the international vogue for the ideas and manufacturing systems inherent in Fordismus?

5. What was the main essence of Taylor’s teaching?

HENRY FORD AND THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

PART 3

A. Understanding the main points

Decide whether the following statements are true or false.

True False

1. The number of American graduate engineers increasingly included chemical and electrical engineers with one big professional association.

2. Artists celebrated the wonders of industrial design as the Renaissance had celebrated the human form.

3. Ford wanted to title one of his own books The Great Today and the Even Greater Yesterday.

4. Ford told his pastor that the thousands of men in the shop only needed the opportunity to do better, and someone to take a personal interest in them.”

5. Within three years of its writing, Ford’s My Life and Work had been translated and had gone through four printings in Russia.