III. Financing ventures.

Білет № 11

I. Choose the correct form of the verbs in italics.

1. We go/we’re going skiing in the French Alps every year.

2. I read/I’m reading one of Agatha Christie’s books at the moment.

3. The St Lawrence River flows/is flowing into the North Atlantic.

4. Drive carefully. It snows/It’s snowing heavily this morning.

5. The planet Mercury travels/is travelling round the sun every 88 days.

II. Telecommunications: what is it and how does it work?

Telecommunications embraces all devices and systems that transmit electronic signals across long distances. Telecommunications allow people around the world to contact one another, to access information immediately, and to communicate from remote areas. Telecommunications usually involves a sender of information and one or more recipients linked by a technology, such as a telephone system, that transmits information from one place to another. Telecommunication devices convert different types of information, such as sound and video", into electronic signals. The signals can then be transmitted by means of media such as telephone wires or radio waves. When a signal reaches its destination, the device on the receiving converts the electronic signal back into an understandable message, such as sound over a telephone, moving images on a television, or words and pictures on a computer screen.

Telecommunications begin with messages that are converted into electronic signals. The signals are then sent over a medium to a receiver, where they are decoded back into a form that the person receiving the message can understand. There are a variety of ways to create and decode signals, and many different ways to transmit signals.

III. Insurance.

Білет № 12

I. Put the words into the correct order.

1. You, of, tell, the, me, can, Paris, code?

2. Cost, does, it, how, to, here, much, park?

3. Money, yesterday, the, for, is, the, looking, stolen, police.

4. She, speak, can, any, fluently, language, foreign?

5. Him, there, to, 20 minutes, get, takes, it.

II. The online job market

Monster.com, the world’s biggest online job-search site, shows how electronic marketplaces reach more people and can offer more efficiency than physical markets. It also shows that money can be made in such markets: Monster has a long record of profitability.

Jeff Taylor, who launched the site in 1994, says that the Monster.com name is the firm’s “single most important success factor”. It introduces an image of youthful fun in what is basically a boring business. Supporting the brand is a big advertising budget which accounts for a quarter of the firm’s costs. He runs expensive ads during key sporting events such as the Super Bowl.

Job-seekers supply resumes and employers pay to scan them or to post job ads. Most of the services that job-seekers get are free, but they have to pay for a service that allows them to contact each other for advice and career management. They can use this service to ask each other questions about, say, what it is like to work for a firm that they are thinking of joining.

The main contribution of Monster has been to speed up hiring and vastly increase the accuracy of the job-search process. “You can post a job at 2 pm and get your first response at 2:01”, Mr. Taylor says proudly.