Контрольная работа на тему Контрольная работа 170116-07

Контрольные задание №1
Вариант 1

Read and translate the text.

Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations
Seventeen seventy-six marked the publication in England of one the most influential books of our time, The Wealth of Nations.
Written by Adam Smith, it earned the author the title The Father of Economics.
Smith objected to the principal economic beliefs of his day.
He differed with the physiocrats who argued that land was the only sources of wealth.
He also disagreed with the mercantilists who measured the wealth of a nation by its money supply, and who called for government regulation of the economy in order to promote a “favorable balance of trade”.
In Smith’s view, a nation’s wealth was dependent upon production, not agriculture alone.
How much it produced, he believed, dependent upon how well it combined labor and other factors of production.
The more efficient the combination, the greater the output, and the greater the nation’s wealth.
The heart of Smith’s economic philosophy was his belief that the economy would work best if left to function on its own without government regulation.
In those circumstances, self-interest would lead business firms to produce only those products that consumers wanted, and to produce them at the lowest possible cost.
They would do this, not as a means of benefiting society, but in an effort to outperform their competitors and gain the greatest profit.
12. But all this self-interest would benefit society as a whole by providing it with more and better goods and services, at the lowest prices.
13. To explain why all society benefits when the economy is free of regulation, Smith used the metaphor of the “invisible hand”:
14. “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command.
15. It is his own advantage, and not that of society, which he was in mind,...but he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisibl