Additional tasks

Ex.1. VOCABULARY EXTENSION: Choose the words from the text. Use a dictionary or Google’s search field (or another search engine) to build up more associations / collocations with each word.

Ex.2. INTERNET: Search the Internet and find out about airport security and body scanners. Share what you discover with your partner(s) at the next lesson.

Ex.3. MAKING A POSTER ON HIGH-TECH: Make a poster about the latest high-tech gadgets and devices. Show your work to your classmates in the next lesson. Did you all have similar things?

Ex.4. WRITING AN ARTICLE: Write a magazine article about the dangers of 3-D body scanners at airports. Include imaginary interviews with an airport security chief and a passenger whose body image ended up on the Internet.

Read what you wrote to your classmates at the next lesson. Write down any new words and expressions you hear from your partner(s).

Ex.5. TRANSLATION: Translate the Russian language article from the “Russian language articles” ADDENDUM.

Unit VIII

Topics: 1.World Trade Organization

2. Russia’s accession to the WTO

Grammar revision: Modal verbs

Text 1

What is the WTO?

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.

There are a number of ways of looking at the World Trade Organization. It is an organization for trade opening. It is a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements. It is a place for them to settle trade disputes. It operates a system of trade rules. Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other.

The WTO was born out of negotiations, and everything the WTO does is the result of negotiations. The bulk of the WTO’s current work comes from the 1986–94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round and earlier negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO is currently the host to new negotiations, under the ‘Doha Development Agenda’ launched in 2001.

Where countries have faced trade barriers and wanted them lowered, the negotiations have helped to open markets for trade. But the WTO is not just about opening markets, and in some circumstances its rules support maintaining trade barriers — for example, to protect consumers or prevent the spread of disease.

At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground rules for international commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits. Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business, while allowing governments to meet social and environmental objectives.

The system’s overriding purpose is to help trade flow as freely as possible — so long as there are no undesirable side effects — because this is important for economic development and well-being. That partly means removing obstacles. It also means ensuring that individuals, companies and governments know what the trade rules are around the world, and giving them the confidence that there will be no sudden changes of policy. In other words, the rules have to be ‘transparent’ and predictable.

Trade relations often involve conflicting interests. Agreements, including those painstakingly negotiated in the WTO system, often need interpreting. The most harmonious way to settle these differences is through some neutral procedure based on an agreed legal foundation. That is the purpose behind the dispute settlement process written into the WTO agreements.

What WTO stands for:

The WTO agreements are lengthy and complex because they are legal texts covering a wide range of activities. But a number of simple, fundamental principles run throughout all of these documents. These principles are the foundation of the multilateral trading system.