Engineering MOSAIC. Мантатова С.С - 14 стр.

UNIT IX                                                                         3. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, sales declined
A brief history of American automobile                                    sharply, and civilian automobile production halted entirely during
Before you start                                                          World War II. Production then rose quickly during the postwar boom
1. Work in pairs. Tell your partner about your favourite form of          of the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, sharp increases in the price of
transport for short journeys (car, bus, etc…) and for long journeys,      gasoline helped to trigger two worldwide recessions, reducing car
and say what kind of transport do you prefer? Why?                        sales, before the U.S. economy recovered to a pattern of steady
Reading                                                                   growth in the mid-1980s, allowing the decline in automobile sales at
2. Read the text and decide which paragraph deals with:                   least to be halted. Competition from abroad brought on another
a) Hard times for automobile industry                                     downturn in U.S. car production in the late 1980s; the downturn was
b) It’s hard to imagine times without automobile                          exacerbated by the 1991 recession.
c) Mass production of cars starts with the assembly lines                       4. By the end of the 1990s, while the American automobile
d) New times are not bad ones                                             industry had not regained the dominant position it had held some
                                                                          thirty-five years earlier, it showed increasing signs of vitality,
           A brief history of American automobile                         reflected not only in high levels of profits, but also in new designs
                                                                          and innovations.
       1. After more than one hundred years of automobile production,     3. Read the four paragraphs again and decide if the statements below
it is hard to imagine a time when cars did not exist. But just like any   are true (T) or false (F):
other new product, the automobile had to start with an idea. No single          1. Reasonable prices made the Ford Motor Company rich
discovery led to the development of the automobile, and the idea of a           2. Sales grew up quickly in the mid 1980-s
motorized carnage occurred to many individuals in the United States,            3. Henry Ford didn’t understand the potential value of the
Germany, France, and Great Britain in the late nineteenth century. At     assembly line
the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the         4. American automobile industry is innovative and profitable
area around Detroit was full of innovators developing their various             5. Competition brought new ideas in car production
cars - Ransom E., the Dodge brothers, and Henry Ford, ultimately the      Vocabulary
most successful of them all.                                              4. Choose the correct meaning (a, b or c) of the words in italics.
       2. Henry Ford is generally given credit for having recognized      1. decline      a)reject     b)persuade      c) turn down
the potential value of a vehicle that could be made available at a        2. increase     a) boost     b)top           c)bottom
reasonable price. His major innovation was the assembly line, which       3. credit       a)blame      b)recognition c) tribute
allowed mass production; this was the key to his lower car prices.        4. dominant a)main           b)big           c)important
Furthermore, Ford managed to obtain the needed financial resources        Writing
to hire and train a labor force that could produce the automobiles.       5. Imagine you a car manufacturer and you are going to take part in
Underlying all his other successes was the creation of the                the International Conference. Make a short report on one of these or
organization—the Ford Motor Company - within which the                    any other automobile problems:
production, financing, and marketing took place. Ford’s success was       1) The automobile industry affects our life.
due as much to his ability to come up with innovative ways of             2) The hard times influence the automobile industry.
providing incentives and organizing production as to his skill in
solving technical problems.