This new servant of man is only about twenty-five years old, but it has already changed the lives of more that 200 million Americans. Wherever the citizen turns, he finds a computer working. It helps him make long-distance and local telephone calls.

Computers are also used when one reserves space on an airplane. Walk into airline office. Before selling you a ticket, the reservation clerk uses machine to record information about where you want to go and the flight number of the plane that will take you to your destination. This information is sent instantly to a central computer that may be many kilometres away from the airline office. Within seconds, the computer informs the clerk whether or not there is space for you on that plane.

Such reservation systems are now in increasing use. They are also employed by hotels, by companies that rent cars, and by offices that sell tickets to theatres and sport events. The computer not only determines what seats are available at what prices, but it also prints the tickets at the same time.

When you buy an automobile, a factory process, that is controlled by a computer, enables you to obtain a car with your own choice of colors and special features in just a few weeks' time. In medical laboratories, computers have reduced the errors in testing, and they have saved doctors countless hours of work. Before long, medical histories of all Americans will be kept in "computer banks". If a person becomes ill far from his home, local doctors will be able to get his medical record immediately. In science, the computer has performed in minutes experiments which would have required thousands of hours of work by human hands and minds.

More and more Americans use computers in their daily lives. In some American schools, for example, young children are being taught by computers for part of the school day.

The use of computers in schools has worried some Americans. There are those who fear it will remove the human element from teacher-student relationship. Some teachers fear that computers will take their jobs. On the other hand, there are educators who consider computers a valuable means of freeing teachers from the more boring and tiring tasks, enabling them to spend more time with individual students.

In education, as in business and industry, science and medicine, computers play an important part in almost every type of operation. The future will bring major advances in computer technology and applications, which will aid man in his efforts to improve his world.

БЛОК ЧТЕНИЯ ДЛЯ ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКИХ СПЕЦИАЛЬНОСТЕЙ

Text 1. Economics

Economics (from the Greek "household management") is a social science that studies the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services.

Economics, which focuses on measurable variables, is broadly divided into two main branches: microeconomics, which deals with individual agents, such as households and businesses, and macroeconomics, which considers the economy as a whole, in which case it considers aggregate supply and demand for money, capital and commodities. Aspects receiving particular attention in economics are resource allocation, production, distribution, trade, and competition. Economic logic is increasingly applied to any problem that involves choice under scarcity or determining economic value. Mainstream economics focuses on how prices reflect supply and demand, and uses equations to predict consequences of decisions.

 The fundamental assumption underlying traditional economic theory is the utility-maximizing rule.

Text 2. Tax

A tax is a compulsory charge or other levy imposed on an individual or a legal entity by a state or a functional equivalent of a state (e.g., tribes, secessionist movements or revolutionary movements). Taxes could also be imposed by a subnational entity.

Taxes may be paid in cash or in kind or as corvee labor. In modern capitalist taxation systems, taxes are designed to encourage the most efficient circulation of goods and services and are levied in cash. In kind and corvee taxation are characteristic of traditional or pre-capitalist states and their functional equivalents. The means of taxation, and the uses to which the funds raised through taxation should be put, are a matter of hot dispute in politics and economics, so discussions of taxation are frequently tendentious.

Public finance is the field of political science and economics that deals with taxation.

HISTORY OF TAXATION

Political authority has been used to raise capital throughout history. In many pre-monetary societies, such as the Incan empire, taxes were owed in labor. Taxation in labor was the basis of the Feudal system in medieval Europe.

In more sophisticated economies such as the Roman Empire, tax farming developed, as the central powers could not practically enforce their tax policy across a wide realm. The tax farmers were obligated to raise large sums for the government, but were allowed to keep whatever else they raised.

Many Christians have understood the New Testament to support the payment of taxes, through Jesus's words "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's".

There were certain times in the Middle Ages where the governments did not explicitly tax, since they were self-supporting, owning their own land and creating their own products. The appearance of doing without taxes was however illusory, since the government's (usually the Crown's) independent income sources depended on labor enforced under the feudal system, which is a tax exacted in kind.

Many taxes were originally introduced to fund wars and are still in place today, such as those raised by the American government during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Income tax was first introduced into Britain in 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars and into Canada in 1917 as a "temporary" tax under the Income War Tax Act to cover government expenses resulting from World War I.

The current income tax in America was set up by Theodore Roosevelt in 1913. It was called The Federal Income Tax and was deducted from incomes at rates varying from 1-7%. But, since then, the American Tax Code has been modified and new taxes have been added, especially over the World War I and II periods. Since World War II, the American Tax Code has increased in size four-fold.

Text 3. Profit

The pursuit and realization of profit is an essential characteristic of capitalism. Profit is derived by selling a product for more than the cost required to produce or acquire it. Some consider the pursuit of profit to be the essence of capitalism. Sociologist and economist, Max Weber, says that "capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of conscious, rational, capitalistic enterprise". However, it is not a unique characteristic for capitalism, some practiced profitable barter and monetary profit has been known since antiquity.

Opponents of capitalism often protest that private owners of capital do not remunerate laborers the full value of their production but keep a portion as profit, claiming this to be exploitative. However, defenders of capitalism argue that when a worker is paid the wage for which he agreed to work, there is no exploitation, especially in a free market where no one else is making an offer more desirable to the worker; that "the full value of a worker's production" is based on his work, not on how much profit is created, something that depends almost entirely on factors that are independent of the worker's performance; that profit is a critical measure of how much value is created by the production process; that the private owners are the ones who should decide how much of the profit is to be used to increase the compensation of the workers (which they often do, as bonuses); and that profit provides the capital for further growth and innovation.

Text 4. Plastic Money

Plastic money is the name given to all types of plastic money, which are used in place of cash. There are different names for these cards but in general they have two main purposes: to enable people to obtain cash; or to make payments without using cash or cheques.

Banks now make available to their customers a single card which does three things: it guarantees cheques; it obtains cash from automatic machines, and it pays for goods. The fourth use of the plastic card is to give customers credit when they purchase goods or services.

Credit cards are issued by credit card companies such as Access, MasterCard, Visa, American Express. Some others are owned by banks. There are debit cards and credit cards.

The latest development of the plastic money is the Smart Card.

Cash dispenser, automatic teller machine, are some of the names given to machines from which customers can withdraw money from their bank accounts, using their cash cards. They can do this at any branch of their bank and the branches of other banks that are linked to their bank.

With the cash card, customers also receive a PIN or a personal identification number which they should memorize. When using the dispenser, customers insert their card and key the PIN number in it. By following a clear set of instructions which appear on video screen, they can withdraw cash up to a certain limit, check the balance of their account or deposit money.