考研英语核心词汇速成胜经Unit 26
一、真题文章（1994年text 1）
The American economic system is organized around a basically private-enterprise, market-oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most. Private businessmen, striving to make profits, produce these goods and services in competition with other businessmen; and the profit motive, operating under competitive pressures, largely determines how these goods and services are produced. Thus, in the American economic system it is the demand of individual consumers, coupled with the desire of businessmen to maximize profits and the desire of individuals to maximize their incomes, that together determine what shall be produced and how resources are used to produce it.
An important factor in a market-oriented economy is the mechanism by which consumer demands can be expressed and responded to by producers. In the American economy, this mechanism is provided by a price system, a process in which prices rise and fall in response to relative demands of consumers and supplies offered by seller-producers. If the product is in short supply relative to the demand, the price will be bid up and some consumers will be eliminated from the market. If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in turn will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product. Thus, price is the regulating mechanism in the American economic system.
The important factor in a private-enterprise economy is that individuals are allowed to own productive resources (private property) , and they are permitted to hire labor, gain control over natural resources, and produce goods and services for sale at a profit. In the American economy, the concept of private property embraces not only the ownership of productive resources but also certain rights, including the right to determine the price of a product or to make a free contract with another private individual.
二、译文
美国的经济体系是围绕一个基本的私营企业进行组织的，它是以市场为向导的经济，在这个体系中，通过在市场上花钱购买那些消费者最需要的商品和服务，消费者在很大程度上决定了将要生产什么。为了追逐利润，私营的商人们生产这些产品或提供这些服务，并和其他商人竞争，而这种竞争压力下的谋利动机在很大程度上决定了如何生产这些产品和提供服务。因此，在美国的经济体系下，消费者的个人需求，还有商人追求利润最大化的欲望以及个人对收入使用价值最大话的要求，这些加在一起共同决定了生产什么和怎样利用有限的资源进行生产。
在以市场为向导的经济体制中有一个重要的因素，就是要建立起一个合理的机制使消费者的需求得以体现，并传达到生产者那里。在美国经济中，这一机制是由价格体系来提供，就是通过价格的涨落来表现供求关系。如果某种产品供不应求，价格应就会上
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