Задание 15. Определите объем фоновой информации, необходимой для раскрытия содержания следующих американских реалий при переводе.

Задание 16. Выполните полный письменный перевод следующего текста.

General Motors Getting Eaten Alive by a Free Lunch

By Allan Sloan

A free lunch can be the most expensive meal in the world. For living proof, look at GeneralMotors. A big reason that GM has gotten into such trouble is that the pension and health care commitments it made to employees decades ago seemed to be a free lunch.

The United Autoworkers placed a high value on these benefits, but the accounting rules of the time placed no cost on GM's risk of providing them. So the UAW and GM made deals that were heavy on benefits, relatively light on wages.

Lower salaries meant that GM reported higher profits, which translated into higher stock prices and higher bonuses for executives. Commitments for pensions and "other post-employment benefits" — known as OPEB in the accounting biz — had little initial impact on GM's profit statement and didn't count as obligations on its balance sheet. So why not keep employees happy with generous benefits? It was a free lunch. Besides, GM's only major competitors at the time, Ford and Chrysler, were making similar deals.

Now, as we all can see, pension and health care obligations are eating GM alive. The bill for the "free" lunch has come in - and GM is having trouble paying the tab. In the past two years, GM has put almost $30 billion into its pension funds and a trust to cover its OPEB obligations. Yet these accounts are still a combined $54 billion underwater.

GM began its slide down the slippery slope in 1950, when it began picking up costs for medical insurance, pensions and retiree benefits. There was huge risk to GM in taking on these obligations — but that didn't show up as a cost or balance-sheet liability. By 1973, the UAW says, GM was paying the entire health insurance bill for its employees, survivors and retirees, and had agreed to "30 and out" early retirement that granted workers full pensions after 30 years on the job, regardless of age.

These problems began to surface about 15 years ago because regulators changed the accounting rules which put OPEB balance sheet. Now, these obligations — call it a combined $170 billion for U.S. operations — are fully visible. And out-of-pocket costs for health care are eating GM alive.

"At the time GM began offering these benefits, no one had any idea that the costs for prescription drugs and medical services would explode the way they have," says GM spokesman Jerry Dubrowski. True. But the UAW was astute (or lucky) enough to push the risk of covering these costs onto GM.

GM's pension funds are in pretty good shape, thanks to an $18.5 billion infusion two years ago. GM got this cash by selling bonds at relatively low rates_r hoping to resolve its pension problems once and for all. This maneuver has been successful so far, but funding the pension plans has consumed much of GM's borrowing power and strained its balance sheet.

At the end of last year, GM says, its U.S. pension funds showed a $3 billion surplus. GM's pension accountings which assumes that the funds will earn an average of 9 percent a year on their assets, is highly optimistic. But things are under control — as long as GM stays solvent.

By contrast, OPEB is out of control. At year-end, OPEB was $57 billion in the hole, even though GM threw $9 billion into an OPEB trust in 2004. The company has no legal obligation to pre-fund these costs, but it's trying to show the financial markets and its workers that it’s dealing with them. The OPEB trust has a hefty $20 billion of assets — but GM calculates its obligations at a staggering $77 billion.

What's more, GM says they're rising at 10.5 percent a year. Thus, even though President Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit whacked $4 billion off GM's OPEB obligation last year - thanks, George — it covered barely half the year's increase in the liability.

If GM were making lots of money selling vehicles, this would all be manageable, sort of. GM could buy enough time for demographics to bail it out, as more retirees begin getting Social Security and Medicare, reducing GM's costs, and other retirees die off. Its ratio of retirees to workers, currently 2.5 to 1, would shrink. Alas, GM's vehicle business is in the tank. Unless GM starts making money on vehicles or gets a break from the UAW or the federal government, things are going to get really ugly. I hope that doesn't happen, but it easily could.

ЧАСТЬ III

ТЕКСТЫ ДЛЯ САМОСТОЯТЕЛЬНОЙ РАБОТЫ

I. ИНФОРМАЦИОННО-ТЕРМИНОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ТЕКСТЫ

Текст 1

The modern approach to natural history

The science of life is being put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle ─ a piece added here by the ancient Chinese, a bit by Aristotle, and sections contributed by people like Linnaeus, Darwin and Mendel. We now have some important areas complete, but there is still a long way to go.

From a naturalist's point of view the progress of knowledge can be divided into four stages: what, where, how and why. We are still working on the "what" and "where", of course, though nowadays we have a pretty good idea of which living organisms inhabit the earth with us and where they are found. With Darwin's revolutionary theory we come to the "why" stage in our studies. Why are there so many different kinds of finch in the Galapagos Islands? Why are orchid flowers shaped so curiously? Darwin, too, asked "How?" -  how does a plant climb a trellis, and how do tiny corals build whole tropical islands?

One of the foremost naturalists in Victorian times was the French entomologist Fabre. As for as he was concerned, although it was important to make collections of insects it was also important to know how and why they behaved as they did. He was one of the first entomologists to go out into the field and study how insects lead their lives in nature. Not only that, he could write about his discoveries simply and beautifully so that even people who did not understand anything about entomology could appreciate them. J remember when I was ten years old, my brother Lawrence introduced me to Fabre's writings. They opened up a magical world. Here was a man who could tell me why dung beetles so busily made little balls from horse or cow manure and buried them and how the glow-worm overpowers and consumes snails; who could tell me what a praying mantis did on her wedding night and who could describe exciting experiments to prove his theories ─ he once borrowed a cannon and fired it off in front of his house (breaking all the windows) to see if cicadas could hear. Though his main work was with insects, Fabre was interested in the whole of nature from mushrooms to fossils and his writings meant that you were suddenly transported out into the open air instead of, as with so many Victorian naturalists, into a museum.

This tradition has been carried on by modern naturalists such as Konrad Lorenz, through whose studies of animal behavior has emerged the science of ethology.

Текст 2