UNIT 27

READING

INTERNATIONAL TRADE
PRE-READING TASKS:
 Discussion – Pair work
1. Look around you. How many things can you see that were imported from another country?
2. What are your country’s major trading partners?
3. What are your country’s most important exports?
4. Does your country try to restrict imports?

 Vocabulary preparation
 Match one item from A with one from B to make a common collocation
1. make a. of achieving the targets
2. capable b. for sure
3. turn out c. in stock and share
4. take d. to the pressures of foreign markets
5. know e. job opportunities
6. invest f. to be a disaster
7. increase g. the productivity
8. expose themselves h. into risky ventures
9. create i. a risk
10. get j. a living

 Select the proper definitions of the following terms/words:

Free trade ....................... Stability .......................

Supply chain ....................... Intellectual property .......................

Trademarks ....................... Copyright .......................

Trade barriers ....................... Domestic products .......................

Inefficiency ....................... Productivity .......................

A. The products which are made in own industries

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 B. A legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original
work exclusive rights for its use and distribution

C. International buying and selling of goods, without limits on the amount of goods that one
country can sell to another, and without special taxes on the goods bought from a foreign
country.

D. A situation in which something is not likely to move or change

E. The protection of creations of the mind, which have both a moral and a commercial value.

F. The state of not achieving maximum productivity; failure to make the best use of time or
resources

G. A system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a

product or service from supplier to customer.

H. Any name, symbol, figure, letter, word or mark adopted and used by a manufacturer or
merchant in order to designate specific goods and to distinguish them from those
manufactured or sold by others.

I. The effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate
of output per unit of input.

J. Measures that governments or public authorities introduce to make imported goods or

services less competitive than locally produced goods and services

WHILE READING TASKS

 Choose the best answer

1. What is the minimum age to start working in developing countries?
A: 6 B: 8 C: 4
2. According Ha-Joon Chang, if he supports his son for more than 10 years, the kid will definitely
grow up to be a white-collar worker
A: True B: False C: Not given
3. What do customers have to accept in order to help their domestic firms to grow up?
A: inferior and expensive domestic products
B: cheap and good-quality domestic products
C: cheap and inferior domestic products

 Answer the following questions

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 4. Explain in detail the analogy Chang makes between child labour and free trade (or between
education and protectionism)
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………........................
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
5. What is the short-disadvantage of protecting growing industries?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
 What does each of the underlined part refer to?
6. “This little guy is perfectly capable of making a living” (Paragraph 1)
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................
7. “Well, of course I don’t do this.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...........................

 Words and expressions: Find words in the text with the following meanings
8. the supply of people in a particular country or area who are able and willing to work
9. a person who travels about selling goods, typically advertising them by shouting
10.  the possibility of something bad happening

POST READING TASKS

VOCABULARY REVIEW
 Complete the sentences with one of the words in the following box

protectionism high-return physicist inefficient

stimulate analogy inferior expose

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 1. While there are several investment plans, one can choose ............................ investment
options if they are willing to take risks.
2. You might call something ........................... if its quality is not as good as another.
3. ............................. management may come from the leader’s individual personality.
4. A raise in employee wages can ........................... production
5. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was a great ........................... who outlined the principle of
gravity.
6. There will be a lot of competitive and strong companies coming here and even though
Kosovo is a small company, one of our main interest is to ...................... it to the world
market.
7. Australia’s Treasurer, Wayne Swan, used the ...................... of Hurricane Katrina to convince
his audience that through crisis came a better understanding of underlying weaknesses in a
system.
8. Trade ............................ is how countries raise tariffs and reduce imports to protect their
domestic industries
DISCUSSION
1. Which industries or sectors could be usefully protected in your country, until they had a
comparative advantage?
2. To what extent would you be prepared to use inferior, expensive products from inefficient
producers? What if you thought this ‘might turn out to be a total waste of time’?
3. Although many economists favour free trade, there is also a lot of opposition. There have
been huge and violent protests at meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
 Classify the following statements: which are in favour of and which against free trade
and the policies of the WTO?
 Which set of arguments do you find the most convincing?

A: Free trade and international suppy chains
lead to peace and stability (see Unit 8)
B: WTO policies prohibit developing countries from
protecting infant industries until they are
internationally competitive, although the rich
countries that dominate international trade all did
this
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C: Free trade guarantees the
largest possible foreign markets
for producers and exporters
D: The WTO defends ‘Trade related
intellectual property’ rights (TRIPs),
granting pharmaceutical companies
patents, copyrights and trademarks which
deny poor countries access to lifesaving
medicines and generic drugs.

E: Free trade guarantees consumers G: The prices

the lowest possible prices of exported
F: Lowering trade barriers also breaks
goods does
down other barriers between
not reflect the
peoples and nations
enviromental
cost of
transporting
H: Instead of promoting I: Free trade, them.
internationally recognized comparative
labour and enviromental advantage and
standards, free trade makes it specialization always
easier for production to go lead to economic J: Total world trade in
where the labour is cheapest growth and 2000 was 22 times
and enviromental costs are development. higher than in 1950,
low and as a result people
were much more
prosperous

L: Free trade ensures secure supplies and a greater

choice of components and raw materials for
producers, and of products and services for
K: The WTO classifies most
consumers.
enviromental , labour, health
and safety protection laws as
illegal ‘barriers to trade’; it has
ruled against the US Clean Air
Act and parts of the US
Endangered Species Act
N: WTO policies allow rich countries to dump
heavily subsidized industrially produced food in
poor countries, which damages local
production.
M: The WTO has ruled that governments
cannot take into account ‘non-commercial
values’ such as human rights, opposing child 5
labour, etc.
In favour

Against