Sunlight flooded the cabin as the plane changed course. It was a bright, clear morning. Robyn looked out of the window as England slid slowly by beneath them: cities and towns, their street plans like printed circuits, scattered over a mosaic of tiny fields, connected by the thin wires of railways and motorways. Hard to imagine at this height all the noise and commotion going on down there. Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush hour buses and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting theit own little worlds, oblivisious of how they fitted into the total pircture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminium, the cutting and pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle’s shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these parts with scores of other components – coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, sptings, rubber insulation, plastics trimmings, then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the marketing of the kettle to wholesale and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she switched on her kettle. Neither had Robyn until this moment, and it would never have occurred to her to do so before she met Vic Wilcox.
1c Comprehension
We generally describe the economy as consisting of three sectors:
The primary sector: agriculture, and the extraction of raw materials from the earth;
The secondary sector: manufacturing industry, in which raw materials are turned into finished products (although of course many of the people working for manufacturing companies do not actually make anything, but provide a service – administration, law, finance, marketing, selling, computing, personnel, and so on);
The tertiary sector: the commercial services that help industry produce and distribute goods to final consumers, as well as activities such as education health care, leisure, tourism, and so on.
In lines 4-7, Robyn sees examples of all three. What are they ?
The long sentence in lines 11-28 lists a large number of operations belonging to the different sectors of the economy. Classify the 18 activities from the passage according to which sector they belong to:
Advertising products
Calculating prices
Distributing added value
Marketing products
Packaging products
Smelting iron
Assembling
Cutting metal
Laying cables
Milling metal
Pressing metal
Transportation
Building
Digging iron ore
Maintenance
Mining coal
Pumping oil
Welding metal
Can you think of three important activities to add to each list (not necessarily in relation to the kettle)?
1d Discussion
Which sector do you intend to work in or do you already work in? How do you ‘fit into the total picture’?
How many people in the tertiary sector have you already spoken to today (travelling to collage or work, shopping, eating, and so on)? What about people in the other two sectors? When did you last talk to someone who grew or produced food, for example ?
2. Manufacturing and services
Agricultural labour, represented by Jules Breton (‘The Gleaners’, 1885)
Two hundred years ago, the vast majority of the population of virtually every country lived in the countryside and worked in agriculture. Today, in what many people call ‘the advanced industrialized countries’, only 2-3% of the population earn their living from agriculture. But some people already talk about ‘the postindustrial countries’, because of the growth of service industries, and the decline of manufacturing, which is moving to ‘the developing countries’.
Is manufacturing industry important ? Is its decline in the ‘advanced’ countries inevitable ? Will services adequately replace it ? Two opinions about this follow.
2a Reading
Read this extract from an interview with the well-known Canadian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, and answer the questions.
Why do people worry about the decline of manufacturing ?
Which activities are as important as the production of goods ?
Should people worry about this state of affairs ?