Foreign Trade and Global Economic Influence
The U.S. is the world’s largest trading nation; it is the largest importer and exporter. Besides agricultural products the most part of the U.S. export occupy machinery, automotive products, aircraft and chemicals. The leading U.S. imports are petroleum products, food and beverages, machinery, iron and steel products.
The economy of America depends heavily on foreign imports. Until recently the U.S. exported more goods than it imported. The present situation is the declining competitiveness of American goods in the world market due to poor quality.
It should be specially noted that the U.S. economy depends on the world-wide oil prices. If they are at a low-rate American economy prospers, otherwise it is in decline. This phenomenon can seem the reason for the economic crisis of the USA nowadays. That’s why America has to control the oil field in Iraq which will give it an opportunity to control also over the world one.
Since the U.S. is the world’s leading importer, there are many U.S. dollars in circulation all round the planet. The dollar is used as the standard unit of currency in international markets such as gold and petroleum (which is called petrocurrency, or petrodollar). Large foreign economies such as China, Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and the EU own huge dollar reserves, China’s reserves are more than $2 trillion, the world’s largest.
The U.S. is the world’s largest and most influential financial market, home to major stock and commodities exchanges like NASDAQ, NYSE, AMEX, and CME. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is the largest stock exchange in the world by value of its listed companies’ securities. NASDAQ is another American stock exchange; it has more trading volume per hour than any other stock exchange in the world.
During a decade the USA was taking part in so called trade wars. A trade war is the usage of export and import towards the pressure on the trade partner. One country considers the other one to buy not enough its production and demands for more. Otherwise it promises to limit the import from this country. At the end of 90-s the USA took part in several trade wars at one time: the meat war, the banana war, the grain war, the tax war.
Answer the questions:
1. What does the U.S. export and import?
2. What does the U.S. economy depend on?
3. What major U.S. stock and commodities exchanges do you know?
4. What is the essence of a trade work?
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UNIT 6. CULTURE OF THE USA
American Culture Characteristics
American culture is rich, complex, and unique. Although European cultural patterns predominated, especially in language, the arts, and political institutions, people from Africa, Asia, and North America also contributed to American culture. All of these groups influenced popular tastes in music, dress, entertainment, and cuisine.
Americans attend museums, operas, and ballets, as well as they listen to country and classical music, jazz and folk music, classic rock-and-roll and new wave. They attend and participate in basketball, football, baseball and soccer games. They enjoy food from different foreign cousins (Chinese, Thai, Greek, French, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Cuban). They also developed their own regional foods, such as California cuisine and Southwestern, Creole, and Southern cooking.
American culture has come to symbolize what is most up-to-date and modern. American culture has also become international and is imported by countries around the world.
In the late 19th c. Americans who enjoyed the arts usually lived in big cities or had the money to attend live performances. People who were poor or distant from cultural centers settled for second-rate productions mounted by local troupes or touring groups.
For most of the 20th c. the common quarrel that has absorbed many American artists and thinkers has been one between the values of a mass, democratic culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the few – the quarrel between “low” and “high”.
At the beginning of the 20th c. new technologies and new machines began to appear (the motion-picture camera and the phonograph) that made it possible for music, drama and pictures to reach more people. During the 20th c. mass entertainment extended and the world became consumers of American popular culture. America became the dominant cultural source for entertainment and popular fashion, from the jeans and T-shirts to the music groups and rock stars and the movies. American entertainment is one of the strongest means by which American culture influences the world, although some countries, such as France, resist this influence because they see it as a threat to their unique national culture.
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Answer the questions:
1. Why is American culture rich, complex and unique?
2. What does American culture symbolize?
3. What developed American culture during the 20th c. in comparison with the previous century?
Education in the USA
The general pattern of education in the USA is an 8-year elementary school, followed by a 4-year high school. There is no single governmental agency to prescribe for the American school system; different types of organization and of curriculum are tried out.
Admission to the American high school is automatic on completion of the elementary school. Usually there is no admission examination required by a state university for those who have finished high school within the state.
Private colleges and universities, esp. the larger, well-known ones such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, have rigid requirements for entrance, including an examination.
It usually takes 4 years to meet a degree – a Bachelor of Art or Bachelor of Science. A Master of Arts or Master of Science degree may be obtained in one or two additional years. The Highest academic degree is the Doctor of Philosophy. It may take any number of years to complete the original research work necessary to obtain this degree.
The first American colleges were small and attended by an aristocratic student. The earliest institutions were established in the U.S. between mid-17th – mid-18th cc.:
● Harvard University (1636) – its purpose was to provide a literate ministry for colonial churches, and then it became theological training school;
● the College of William and Mary (1693) at Williamsburg, Virg.;
● Yale University (1701);
● the University of Pennsylvania (1740);
● Princeton University (1746);
● Columbia University (1754);
● Brown University (1764);
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● Rutgers University (1771);
● Dartmouth College (1769).
The last three private institutions initially prepared students for careers in theology, law, medicine, and teaching.
An important development occurred in 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morril Act, which donated public lands to provide colleges with the resources necessary to teach such branches of learning as agriculture and the mechanical art:
● the University of Arizona (1885);
● the University of California and Berkeley (1868);
● the University of Florida (1853);
● the University of Illinois (1867);
● the University of Maryland (1807);
● Michigan State University (1855);
● Ohio State University (1870);
● Pennsylvania State University (1855);
● the University of Wisconsin (1849).
Answer the questions:
1. What is the name of a single governmental agency to prescribe for the
American school system?
2. What well-known private colleges and universities can you name?
3. What were their students prepared for?
4. What is the essence of the Morril Act signed by President Abraham
Lincoln?
Holidays
There are no national holidays in the U.S. Each of the 50 states has jurisdiction over its holidays. In practice, most states observe the federal public holidays. Ten holidays a year are proclaimed by the federal governments:
New Years Day (January, 1);
Martin Luther King Day (3rd Monday in January);
George Washington’s Birthday (3rd Monday in February);
Memorial Day (last Monday in May) – for past wars;
Independence Day (July, 4);
Labor Day (1st Monday in September);
Columbus Day (2nd Monday in October);
Veteran’s Day (November, 11);
Thanksgiving Day (Last Thursday in November);
Christmas (December, 25).
There are holidays which are neither legal nor official:
Valentine’s Day (February, 14);
St. Patrick’s Day (March, 17);
Mother’s Day (2nd Sunday in May);
Father’s Day (3rd Sunday in June);
Halloween (October, 31).
Answer the questions:
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1. What is the difference between the national holidays and the federal public holidays?
2. What American holidays were exported to Ukraine?
3. Tell about one of the American holidays.
Places of Sightseeing
The Pentagon is a building in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington D.C. It has the offices of the U.S. Department of Defense, which includes the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guards.
The Pentagon has five rings (which are inside each other) with five sides, with five stories tall. It is the largest office building in the world: 17 miles of halls, not to get lost in it, the walls on each floor are a different color (brown, green, red, grey, and blue); there are also many maps in the hall.
The Pentagon is like a city: 30,000 people work there. It has its own nurses, dentists, doctors, banks, stores, post office, a fire department, a police department, a centre of communications (hundreds of feet under the ground), own radio and TV stations.
New York is one of the largest cities in the world and the largest sea port; the financial capital of the country; the business center of the U.S. It is in the New York state, at the mouth of the Hudson River. Population – 8 mln. Here, in Wall Street there are many business offices, banks, and NYSE (stock exchange).
There are two world-famous streets in New York – Broadway (the center of the theaters and night life) and Fifth Avenue (great shopping, hotel and Club Avenue; the Metropolitan Museum).
The Statue of Liberty is the Symbol of American democracy. It stands on Liberty Island in New York port.
Beverly Hills – the place where you can find the homes of the movie stars. Beverly Hills is not Los Angeles; it is a small city next to Los Angeles. In Beverly Hills all kinds of celebrities live: movie stars, television stars or other people in the news. Tourists may buy special maps for the houses of the stars. These homes are very beautiful with swimming pools, tennis courts, a lot of trees and high walls.
Only about 35,000 people live there and more than 200,000 people come to Beverly Hills every day to work or to shop. Rodeo Drive is a very special and elegant street with the most expensive shops where people can buy unusual clothing, jewelry or furniture of the new styles and fashions.
Answer the questions:
1. What offices of the U.S. Department of Defense does the Pentagon include?
2. Describe the Pentagon building.
3. How many people work in the Pentagon?
4. Give the main characteristics of the largest city in America.
5. Where is Beverly Hills situated, and what is it famous for?
6. Tell about other famous places in America which you know or visit.
Famous People of America
Mark Twain – Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in a small town on the Mississippi River and became a river pilot. Later he went to west and worked as a newspaper reporter. His pen-name was Mark Twain. He wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” published in 1876. Tom is really Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is his close boyhood friend, Tom Blankenship. The book tells of the boy’s adventures. Other books: “The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer”, and “Huckleberry Finn”, “Life on the Mississippi”.
Abraham Lincoln – the 16th president of the U.S. was born in 1809 in Kentucky. His family was poor, he did not go to school and taught himself to read and write. Later he studied law, and became a lawyer and them a politician. His nickname was “Honest Abe”.
He became a president in 1860 and in 1861 a war between the North and he South began. The Civil War was 4 years; it ended in April 9, 1865. Six day later, President Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning.
Tomas Alva Edison was born in 1847. He was sick and his mother taught him lessons. He read the first scientific books, built a laboratory in his house and began to invent things. At the age of 23 he made a special telegraphic machine and sold it for a lot of money.
He started his own laboratory at Manio Park, New Jersey. He hired mechanics and chemists to help him and invented; over 1,300 inventions belong to him: wax paper, fire alarm, the battery, motion pictures, the phonograph (a record player), and the light bulb. He died in 1931 when he was 84 years.
Ernest Hemingway – the greatest American writer of the XX th c. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was a legend man, an adventurer, a brave war correspondent, an amateur boxer, a hunter, a deep-sea fisherman, the victim of three car accidents and two plane crashes, a man of four wives and many loves, but above all a brilliant writer of stories and novels.
His life provided the background for his stories and novels: “A Farewell to Arms”, story of love between an American lieutenant and an English nurse in WW I. “For whom the Bell Tolls” – novel of war, love and death in the Spanish Civil War. The last years he lived in Cuba and wrote “The Old Man and the Sea”. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
He committed suicide (because of cancer), as his father had done it before him under similar circumstances.
Theodore Roosevelt – the 26th President of the U.S. (from 1901 to 1909). He was a boxer, a soldier, a rancher, and an explorer. He had asthma. Because of boxing he became blind in one eye. His nickname was – “Teddy”. While hunting he did not shoot a little bear; he said the bear was too small. The next day this story was in the newspapers and little was named “Teddy”, and toy bears for children – “teddy bears”. When he left the White House he went to hunt in Africa then to South America to explore the unknown places.
Answer the questions:
1. What famous people of America do you know?
2. In what spheres of the social life are they well-known?
3. What books by Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway did you read and liked most of all?
Task 1. Tell about one of the U.S. Presidents and what deeds he is famous for.
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