Money, Money
Content
Win the maximum prize of $2,000 by
getting all the quiz questions correct!
For $100:
1 If something is so valuable that it cannot be
bought, how can it be described?
A pricey
C worthwhile
B worthless
D priceless
2 Which of these is not a way of describing
someone who hates spending money?
A tight
C penny-pinching
B flashy
D stingy
3 Which of these describes money given to a
person in authority to get them to do
something dishonest?
A a bribe
C a deposit
B an advance
D a fee
4 Tick (.I) the words that describe having a
lot of money and cross (X) the words that
describe having little or none. (All answers
must be correct to win the prize money.)
A skint
C broke
B loaded
D hard up
Vocabulary and speaking
Money and enterprise
1a Work in pairs and answer as many questions in the quiz as you can
without using a dictionary.
b
3.1 Listen and check the quiz answers.
2a Answer the questions below using words/phrases from the quiz.
Then work in pairs and compare your answers.
1 Have you ever:
• been completely broke?
• paid or been offered a bribe?
• paid a lot of money for something that turned out to
be worthless?
2 Do you know anyone who:
• is always in the red?
• is loaded?
• is flashy with their money?
• is very stingy with money?
3 What kind of people generally:
• earn really good tips?
• get high pensions?
• receive large alimony payments?
• go bankrupt?
4 What's happening at the moment in your country? Is there a
boom or a recess ion? What do you think are the causes? Are the
government making a lot of spending cuts?
b Think of three more questions using money words/phrases from
the quiz. Ask other students.
.
be
..
,
., Put the things that can happen to a business/businessperson in order
from 1 (the most positive) to 5 (the least positive). (All answers must
be in the correct order to win the prize money.)
A be in the red
C be in the black
E break even
B go bankrupt
D make a large profit
for $500:
6 Who receives the following from whom? (All answers must be correct
a
to win the prize money.)
A a tip
C pocket money
D a ransom
B a pension
E alimony/maintenance
::"or $1,000:
rs
:an
- Write R if the phrases are normally associated with an economic
recession and B if they are normally associated with an economic
boom. (All answers must be correct to win the prize money.)
A high unemployment
F high share prices
B high property prices
G high salaries
C a large government deficit H an increase in GDP
D businesses going bust
economic expansion
E government spending cuts
4a
Add the money words/phrases from the quiz to
the word web below. Some can go in more than
one category.
What do you think these sayings about money
mean? Do you have any similar sayings in
your language?
-----------,
1
'Money Illakes the world go round. '
L
It
________________
-----------------,
2
dl1Ce"
'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.'
L
r------------.,
did
3
'The love of Illoney is
the root of all evil .'
___________
ransom
.J
,
r -
'Take care of the pennies and the
pounds will take care of theIllselves.'
4
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .J
one
-----------,
'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' I
L
r
wdrd
6
e
,
-
'Money can't buy happiness,
but you can rent it for a while.'
______________
.J
b Choose one saying from exercise 4a that you agree
with and one that you disagree with. Spend a few
minutes thinking about why. Then work in groups
to explain your ideas and find out what other
students think.
_
.J
Imagine that a person's height was exactly equivalent to
their income so that people who earned, say, $25,000 a
year were slightly taller than those who earned $24,000 .
Then imagine that every American adult walks past you in
order of income, from lowest-earning to highest, all in the
space of an hour. The first people to walk past you are the
owners of loss-making businesses, the unemployed and
those on the minimum wage - all of them invisible or tiny
compared to a normal person . Surprisingly, after half an
hour, people are still only waist-high and it is not until threequarters of an hour has passed that the first average-sized
person appears. Near the end of the hour, things start to
get a little scary. With six minutes to go, people are 12
feet tall and in the final few seconds, as the 400 highest
earners walk past, you realise that you can't see their
heads because each one is more than three kilometres tall.
So who are these modern giants who measure their
annual income in the millions? There are the Hollywood
stars, of course, who can command fees in excess of $20
million per film, and professional footballers, the very best
of whom can earn over €30 million a year in salary and
sponsorship deals. But the world of finance and business
can easily compete with these pay packets - and you don't
even have to be successful. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman
Brothers, earned $22 million in 2007, just before the
company went bust, while Leo Apotheker, the short-lived
head of Hewlett-Packard, is reported to have earned $23
million before being fired after just 1 1 months in the job.
Dwarfing all these salaries is Tim Cook's pay for 201 1.
The head of Apple took home $378 million in cash and
sh are options for a year's work - over a million dollars a
day. So the simple question is: is it right that some people
earn so much?
he mora l arguments against such extraordinarily large
pay pac kets are obvious : in a world where 22,000
children die each day from factors caused by poverty, how
ca n i be ri ght th at a few people get so much? There are
plenty of practical argu ments, too . Studies show that the
more unequa l a soc iety is in terms of income, the more
likely its ci izens are to suffer from problems like drug
add iction, men 01ill ness and ill hea lth . Plus, citizens of
more eq ual soc ieties are much more likely to be happy
and to trust each other. In Japan, Sweden and Norway, for
example, more than 60 percent of the population feel that
they can trust their fellow citizens . In countries like the UK,
the USA and Singapore, that figure falls to 15 percent.
And it's not even clear that higher pay leads to better
performance. Research conducted by the renowned
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that
rewarding workers with huge bonuses can be counterproductive . In the study people were given a range of
tasks to complete, physical and mental, and financial
incentives for completing each one. The results showed
that the incentives only worked when the tasks involved
purely mechanical skills - equivalent, perhaps, to the
tasks done by workers on a production line in a factory.
When participants had to think and process information,
incentives led to worse performance. And the higher the
incentive, the worse the performance!
For others, however, remuneration is first and foremost an
issue of freedom. Shouldn't we all be free to make as much
money as we like? Isn't that what drives us to work harder
and to innovate? And many rich people use their incredible
wealth to do great charitable things . Bill Gates, one of the
richest people alive, is using the $65 billion that he earned
as founder of Microsoft to try to alleviate poverty and
eradicate diseases like polio.
People are paid what they are worth, the argument goes,
and if they weren't worth it, they wouldn 't be paid it. Take
film stars, for example. Statistics show that Natalie Portman
films earn $43 for every dollar she is paid, so she justifies
her high fees (at the other end of the scale, recently at
least, is Eddie Murphy, whose films only bring in $2 .30 for
every dollar he's paid) . Even the much-maligned Dick Fuld
was once praised for the 14 years of incredible profit that
Lehman Brothers enjoyed under his leadership.
In the end, whether you think it's fair that some people earn
so much depends partly on the value you attach to money
itself. It is, after all, just paper and there 's no guarantee
that it will solve your problems. As Arnold Schwarzenegger
once said, 'Money doesn't make you happy. I now have
$50 million, but I was just as happy when I had
$48 million .'
getting all the quiz questions correct!
For $100:
1 If something is so valuable that it cannot be
bought, how can it be described?
A pricey
C worthwhile
B worthless
D priceless
2 Which of these is not a way of describing
someone who hates spending money?
A tight
C penny-pinching
B flashy
D stingy
3 Which of these describes money given to a
person in authority to get them to do
something dishonest?
A a bribe
C a deposit
B an advance
D a fee
4 Tick (.I) the words that describe having a
lot of money and cross (X) the words that
describe having little or none. (All answers
must be correct to win the prize money.)
A skint
C broke
B loaded
D hard up
Vocabulary and speaking
Money and enterprise
1a Work in pairs and answer as many questions in the quiz as you can
without using a dictionary.
b
3.1 Listen and check the quiz answers.
2a Answer the questions below using words/phrases from the quiz.
Then work in pairs and compare your answers.
1 Have you ever:
• been completely broke?
• paid or been offered a bribe?
• paid a lot of money for something that turned out to
be worthless?
2 Do you know anyone who:
• is always in the red?
• is loaded?
• is flashy with their money?
• is very stingy with money?
3 What kind of people generally:
• earn really good tips?
• get high pensions?
• receive large alimony payments?
• go bankrupt?
4 What's happening at the moment in your country? Is there a
boom or a recess ion? What do you think are the causes? Are the
government making a lot of spending cuts?
b Think of three more questions using money words/phrases from
the quiz. Ask other students.
.
be
..
,
., Put the things that can happen to a business/businessperson in order
from 1 (the most positive) to 5 (the least positive). (All answers must
be in the correct order to win the prize money.)
A be in the red
C be in the black
E break even
B go bankrupt
D make a large profit
for $500:
6 Who receives the following from whom? (All answers must be correct
a
to win the prize money.)
A a tip
C pocket money
D a ransom
B a pension
E alimony/maintenance
::"or $1,000:
rs
:an
- Write R if the phrases are normally associated with an economic
recession and B if they are normally associated with an economic
boom. (All answers must be correct to win the prize money.)
A high unemployment
F high share prices
B high property prices
G high salaries
C a large government deficit H an increase in GDP
D businesses going bust
economic expansion
E government spending cuts
4a
Add the money words/phrases from the quiz to
the word web below. Some can go in more than
one category.
What do you think these sayings about money
mean? Do you have any similar sayings in
your language?
-----------,
1
'Money Illakes the world go round. '
L
It
________________
-----------------,
2
dl1Ce"
'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.'
L
r------------.,
did
3
'The love of Illoney is
the root of all evil .'
___________
ransom
.J
,
r -
'Take care of the pennies and the
pounds will take care of theIllselves.'
4
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .J
one
-----------,
'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' I
L
r
wdrd
6
e
,
-
'Money can't buy happiness,
but you can rent it for a while.'
______________
.J
b Choose one saying from exercise 4a that you agree
with and one that you disagree with. Spend a few
minutes thinking about why. Then work in groups
to explain your ideas and find out what other
students think.
_
.J
Imagine that a person's height was exactly equivalent to
their income so that people who earned, say, $25,000 a
year were slightly taller than those who earned $24,000 .
Then imagine that every American adult walks past you in
order of income, from lowest-earning to highest, all in the
space of an hour. The first people to walk past you are the
owners of loss-making businesses, the unemployed and
those on the minimum wage - all of them invisible or tiny
compared to a normal person . Surprisingly, after half an
hour, people are still only waist-high and it is not until threequarters of an hour has passed that the first average-sized
person appears. Near the end of the hour, things start to
get a little scary. With six minutes to go, people are 12
feet tall and in the final few seconds, as the 400 highest
earners walk past, you realise that you can't see their
heads because each one is more than three kilometres tall.
So who are these modern giants who measure their
annual income in the millions? There are the Hollywood
stars, of course, who can command fees in excess of $20
million per film, and professional footballers, the very best
of whom can earn over €30 million a year in salary and
sponsorship deals. But the world of finance and business
can easily compete with these pay packets - and you don't
even have to be successful. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman
Brothers, earned $22 million in 2007, just before the
company went bust, while Leo Apotheker, the short-lived
head of Hewlett-Packard, is reported to have earned $23
million before being fired after just 1 1 months in the job.
Dwarfing all these salaries is Tim Cook's pay for 201 1.
The head of Apple took home $378 million in cash and
sh are options for a year's work - over a million dollars a
day. So the simple question is: is it right that some people
earn so much?
he mora l arguments against such extraordinarily large
pay pac kets are obvious : in a world where 22,000
children die each day from factors caused by poverty, how
ca n i be ri ght th at a few people get so much? There are
plenty of practical argu ments, too . Studies show that the
more unequa l a soc iety is in terms of income, the more
likely its ci izens are to suffer from problems like drug
add iction, men 01ill ness and ill hea lth . Plus, citizens of
more eq ual soc ieties are much more likely to be happy
and to trust each other. In Japan, Sweden and Norway, for
example, more than 60 percent of the population feel that
they can trust their fellow citizens . In countries like the UK,
the USA and Singapore, that figure falls to 15 percent.
And it's not even clear that higher pay leads to better
performance. Research conducted by the renowned
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that
rewarding workers with huge bonuses can be counterproductive . In the study people were given a range of
tasks to complete, physical and mental, and financial
incentives for completing each one. The results showed
that the incentives only worked when the tasks involved
purely mechanical skills - equivalent, perhaps, to the
tasks done by workers on a production line in a factory.
When participants had to think and process information,
incentives led to worse performance. And the higher the
incentive, the worse the performance!
For others, however, remuneration is first and foremost an
issue of freedom. Shouldn't we all be free to make as much
money as we like? Isn't that what drives us to work harder
and to innovate? And many rich people use their incredible
wealth to do great charitable things . Bill Gates, one of the
richest people alive, is using the $65 billion that he earned
as founder of Microsoft to try to alleviate poverty and
eradicate diseases like polio.
People are paid what they are worth, the argument goes,
and if they weren't worth it, they wouldn 't be paid it. Take
film stars, for example. Statistics show that Natalie Portman
films earn $43 for every dollar she is paid, so she justifies
her high fees (at the other end of the scale, recently at
least, is Eddie Murphy, whose films only bring in $2 .30 for
every dollar he's paid) . Even the much-maligned Dick Fuld
was once praised for the 14 years of incredible profit that
Lehman Brothers enjoyed under his leadership.
In the end, whether you think it's fair that some people earn
so much depends partly on the value you attach to money
itself. It is, after all, just paper and there 's no guarantee
that it will solve your problems. As Arnold Schwarzenegger
once said, 'Money doesn't make you happy. I now have
$50 million, but I was just as happy when I had
$48 million .'
